By Kevin Guilfoile
We generally try to keep the self-promotion around here to a minimum, although we also try to give props and hoorays, not just to each other, but to other writers we like. The publishing business is fraught with jealousy and envy, but I've never seen a community that embraces the philosophy of "all boats rising together" the way the mystery/thriller/suspense family does.
In boating analogies, this season for The Outfit is like the Chicago to Mackinac race.
David Ellis's new book, THE HIDDEN MAN is out this month. The Chicago Tribune's Julia Keller had a terrific profile of David on the front page of the Live section in yesterday's paper. (BTW, I also took a year off from writing novels, although in my case you can cross out "directing the prosecution of a corrupt and unrepentant governor" and substitute "potty training.")
HARDBALL, the much-anticipated next installment of Sara Paretsky's beloved V.I. Warshawski series comes out next week ("Paretsky is in full Furies mode..." Marilyn Stasio says in this Sunday's NYT Book Review. "It’s a distinct pleasure to hear her unapologetically strident voice once again."). Libby Hellman's new novel DOUBLEBACK is out on October 1. Anyone who read Libby's EASY INNOCENCE has already pre-ordered, I assure you.
Laura Caldwell released three acclaimed Izzy McNeil novels this summer. I'll repeat that. RED HOT LIES came out June 1. RED BLOODED MURDER was released July 1. RED WHITE AND DEAD came out August 1. This is only marginally less difficult than having all your readers stand behind you and read over your shoulder while you type.
Barbara D'Amato is contributing to a book (with Jeanne Dams) called FOOLPROOF, out December 3. David Heinzmann's novel, A WORD TO THE WISE will be released December 9.
Sean Chercover's TRIGGER CITY has just been released on audio. You can download Marcus Sakey's most recent, THE AMATEURS at Audible as well.
But enough about us. What new and upcoming books are you excited about?
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query david heinzmann. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query david heinzmann. Sort by date Show all posts
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
...Son, always be a good boy; don't ever play with guns
By David Heinzmann
In the little central-Illinois town where I grew up just about everybody I knew kept firearms. Our own home was loaded with them.
We had an old gun cabinet with brittle glass doors in our basement that contained four or five shotguns, a .22-caliber lever-action rifle that looked like it had been drawn directly from the saddle scabbard on John Wayne’s horse, as well as a .22 Ruger revolver that also looked like a cowboy gun.
On the top shelf of the cabinet behind the boxes of shotgun shells, there was a badly tarnished, nickel-plated .32-caliber revolver that no longer fired, though my father kept it around for some unexplained sentimental reason. That one also looked like it came from the movies, but something starring Humphrey Bogart instead of the Duke.
Then there was the loaded Smith & Wesson .38 that my dad kept in his top dresser drawer for protection. I know, to urban and suburban sensibilities it probably sounds absurd, but it was a one-cop town, the middle of a recession, and, well, who knows. All I can say is that my dad was an educated and reasonable man of his time who worried about the well-being of his family. Anyway, it was heavy and black, well-oiled, and definitely serious business.
I learned early the basics of handling a gun, where the safety was, and how to always be conscious of where you’re pointing the thing. My dad would occasionally take me out into a ravine in the woods and set up a few soda can targets. I’d shoot the little .22 revolver, which made a sound like firecrackers and compressed air. And then that big, heavy .38 that always sounded like a bomb going off to my tender ears.
My dad hunted and by the time I was an adolescent, my older brother was an avid hunter, as well. I never took to it, but weekends in the fall I usually accompanied them to a friend’s small farm on the edge of town where we’d shoot trap with shotguns. They were practicing to down pheasants and geese. I was just tagging along.
Five or six of us would stand in a line with this spring-loaded throwing contraption set in the dirt in the middle of us. Pulling a cord would release the arm and send clay pigeons, these little Frisbees made of crude, lightweight ceramic, spinning into the sky. I could probably hit six out of ten on a really good day.
But one afternoon I was waiting my turn, standing next to the guy who owned the farm, a .20-guage shotgun under my arm pointed at the ground. All of the sudden my gun went off, shredding the long grass and sending a cloud of dust into the air about ten feet in front of the man next to me. His name was Dick Herring. Everybody looked around, and Dick gave me an easy-going, “Careful there, David.” I think it was my brother who said, what the hell?, and in the moment, I couldn’t explain why the gun had gone off, though I’m sure my finger was on the trigger when it shouldn’t have been.
Nobody was hurt, but I had a what in God’s name am I doing here? moment. I’m not a hunter; I’m not much of a shot. All I’m really doing is spending time with my old man and my brother. As I look back, that was a pretty good reason. My father would be dead of cancer less than five years later, and I cherish all the time I spent with him. And the camaraderie and amiable bullshitting of those afternoons are part of a why I loved growing up in a small town. But that was the beginning of the end of my time playing with guns.
It was a good lesson. You really don’t want to be careless for even a second with a loaded gun in your hand.
I think of this 25-year-old episode fairly often. I thought of it a few weeks ago when my mother shared the news that Dick Herring—in his 70s—had died. And I thought of it again last week when a cop friend was recounting how he had to tell a writer acquaintance of his that the elaborate and technical gun stuff in her book was all wrong. None of that stuff matters to me.
In my own novel, A Word to the Wise, I put a sawed-off shotgun in a villain’s hands at one point. When a gun-nut friend read it, he questioned whether I had the bad guy using it correctly. I thought I did, but in the end I just took the technical stuff out. It didn’t matter a bit to the drama of the moment.
As far as I’m concerned, guns are either big or little; long or short. And people either know how to use them, or they don’t.
In the little central-Illinois town where I grew up just about everybody I knew kept firearms. Our own home was loaded with them.
We had an old gun cabinet with brittle glass doors in our basement that contained four or five shotguns, a .22-caliber lever-action rifle that looked like it had been drawn directly from the saddle scabbard on John Wayne’s horse, as well as a .22 Ruger revolver that also looked like a cowboy gun.
On the top shelf of the cabinet behind the boxes of shotgun shells, there was a badly tarnished, nickel-plated .32-caliber revolver that no longer fired, though my father kept it around for some unexplained sentimental reason. That one also looked like it came from the movies, but something starring Humphrey Bogart instead of the Duke.
Then there was the loaded Smith & Wesson .38 that my dad kept in his top dresser drawer for protection. I know, to urban and suburban sensibilities it probably sounds absurd, but it was a one-cop town, the middle of a recession, and, well, who knows. All I can say is that my dad was an educated and reasonable man of his time who worried about the well-being of his family. Anyway, it was heavy and black, well-oiled, and definitely serious business.
I learned early the basics of handling a gun, where the safety was, and how to always be conscious of where you’re pointing the thing. My dad would occasionally take me out into a ravine in the woods and set up a few soda can targets. I’d shoot the little .22 revolver, which made a sound like firecrackers and compressed air. And then that big, heavy .38 that always sounded like a bomb going off to my tender ears.
My dad hunted and by the time I was an adolescent, my older brother was an avid hunter, as well. I never took to it, but weekends in the fall I usually accompanied them to a friend’s small farm on the edge of town where we’d shoot trap with shotguns. They were practicing to down pheasants and geese. I was just tagging along.
Five or six of us would stand in a line with this spring-loaded throwing contraption set in the dirt in the middle of us. Pulling a cord would release the arm and send clay pigeons, these little Frisbees made of crude, lightweight ceramic, spinning into the sky. I could probably hit six out of ten on a really good day.
But one afternoon I was waiting my turn, standing next to the guy who owned the farm, a .20-guage shotgun under my arm pointed at the ground. All of the sudden my gun went off, shredding the long grass and sending a cloud of dust into the air about ten feet in front of the man next to me. His name was Dick Herring. Everybody looked around, and Dick gave me an easy-going, “Careful there, David.” I think it was my brother who said, what the hell?, and in the moment, I couldn’t explain why the gun had gone off, though I’m sure my finger was on the trigger when it shouldn’t have been.
Nobody was hurt, but I had a what in God’s name am I doing here? moment. I’m not a hunter; I’m not much of a shot. All I’m really doing is spending time with my old man and my brother. As I look back, that was a pretty good reason. My father would be dead of cancer less than five years later, and I cherish all the time I spent with him. And the camaraderie and amiable bullshitting of those afternoons are part of a why I loved growing up in a small town. But that was the beginning of the end of my time playing with guns.
It was a good lesson. You really don’t want to be careless for even a second with a loaded gun in your hand.
I think of this 25-year-old episode fairly often. I thought of it a few weeks ago when my mother shared the news that Dick Herring—in his 70s—had died. And I thought of it again last week when a cop friend was recounting how he had to tell a writer acquaintance of his that the elaborate and technical gun stuff in her book was all wrong. None of that stuff matters to me.
In my own novel, A Word to the Wise, I put a sawed-off shotgun in a villain’s hands at one point. When a gun-nut friend read it, he questioned whether I had the bad guy using it correctly. I thought I did, but in the end I just took the technical stuff out. It didn’t matter a bit to the drama of the moment.
As far as I’m concerned, guns are either big or little; long or short. And people either know how to use them, or they don’t.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Come see Kogan in his natural habitat
Congrats to David on the new shorty. And just a quick note to alert everybody that Rick Kogan--friend of the Outfit and all Chicago writers--is having a book launch party for his own new collection of Sidewalks columns, and the beautiful Chuck Osgood photos that go with them. There's no livelier place in Chicago than the Billy Goat when it's full of reporters...
PLEASE JOIN CHARLES OSGOOD AND RICK KOGAN
TO CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION OF THEIR NEW BOOK
SIDEWALKS II
FRIDAY OCTBER 23
5 P.M. TO 10 P.M.
THE BILLY GOAT TAVERN
430 N. MICHIGAN (LOWER LEVEL)
--David Heinzmann
PLEASE JOIN CHARLES OSGOOD AND RICK KOGAN
TO CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION OF THEIR NEW BOOK
SIDEWALKS II
FRIDAY OCTBER 23
5 P.M. TO 10 P.M.
THE BILLY GOAT TAVERN
430 N. MICHIGAN (LOWER LEVEL)
--David Heinzmann
Monday, July 13, 2009
Plan to not fail
By David Heinzmann
Every once in a while I think of a tidbit about David Mamet I once read. On the wall next to his writing desk he had tacked a card that read something like: To fail to plan is to plan to fail.
Some writers need to plan more than others, perhaps, but everybody needs a layer or two of discipline. Often when we talk about this we mean either carving out the same writing time and a word count every day, or addressing the question of outlining or not.
For a handful of reasons (but mostly because of two shorties under the age of 5) I struggle with carving out the regular writing time. And I can’t say that the outlines I’ve made have been worth all the time I put into them, though I’d surely have been worse off without them.
Lately, when I've thought of the Mamet maxim, I’ve also been thinking about the first kind of planning I learned as a writer. When I was in college I had a wonderful creative writing teacher named A.E. Claeyssens who taught a novel writing class. We all had a novel we were planning to write, but first Claey had us spend most of the semester writing what he called preliminaries, volumes of character profiles, pages and pages of their external and internal lives, biographical details we’d never put on the page in the novel, but the stuff that makes you understand who they are so that the actions and thoughts that do make it onto the page ring true. Exploring characters before you write is one way to tell as story, but some writers feel they need to discover their characters as they go. When they’re in the zone and become lost in the story, the characters reveal themselves, etc.
I got a lot of out preliminaries, but somewhere along the way I stopped doing them, partly because in the years since college I’ve learned to write with a gun to my head—on deadline, nearly every day.
By necessity, I do a good bit of my fiction writing on the L-train ride to and from work. It’s not the best method, mainly because it comes in half-hour chunks. But I take my time alone where I can get it.
I write in a notebook atop a leather brief case sitting on my lap. The eventual typing up of my chicken scratch becomes an act of revision, with most of those revelatory writing moments coming in the late-night transcription sessions at the keyboard. I actually find the process to be fairly productive, if not ideal.
Lately, as I’ve been rewriting the ending for the novel I’m trying to finish, I’ve felt particularly unplanned and at least frustrated, if not failing. When my agent read the manuscript a few months ago, he said the ending felt a little easy. So I pulled back from the big moment of revelation in the book, and started going sideways a bit. I wrote several new scenes with my man Flood continuing to stumble in the dark.
But I was having trouble finding the final confrontation that will get me back to the end. Trying to major surgery on the plot, I suddenly had no real plan.
This is what brings me to the lessons of Mamet and Claeyssens. Without thinking about it the other day, I started retroactively writing out preliminaries on the train. I’m once again finding my way through with the preliminaries.
Looking forward, I’m pretty sure I’m going to need preliminaries for the next book, too. I have a premise and protagonist, a couple of scenes, but the big picture remains a fog. I’m going to need serious plan.
Every once in a while I think of a tidbit about David Mamet I once read. On the wall next to his writing desk he had tacked a card that read something like: To fail to plan is to plan to fail.
Some writers need to plan more than others, perhaps, but everybody needs a layer or two of discipline. Often when we talk about this we mean either carving out the same writing time and a word count every day, or addressing the question of outlining or not.
For a handful of reasons (but mostly because of two shorties under the age of 5) I struggle with carving out the regular writing time. And I can’t say that the outlines I’ve made have been worth all the time I put into them, though I’d surely have been worse off without them.
Lately, when I've thought of the Mamet maxim, I’ve also been thinking about the first kind of planning I learned as a writer. When I was in college I had a wonderful creative writing teacher named A.E. Claeyssens who taught a novel writing class. We all had a novel we were planning to write, but first Claey had us spend most of the semester writing what he called preliminaries, volumes of character profiles, pages and pages of their external and internal lives, biographical details we’d never put on the page in the novel, but the stuff that makes you understand who they are so that the actions and thoughts that do make it onto the page ring true. Exploring characters before you write is one way to tell as story, but some writers feel they need to discover their characters as they go. When they’re in the zone and become lost in the story, the characters reveal themselves, etc.
I got a lot of out preliminaries, but somewhere along the way I stopped doing them, partly because in the years since college I’ve learned to write with a gun to my head—on deadline, nearly every day.
By necessity, I do a good bit of my fiction writing on the L-train ride to and from work. It’s not the best method, mainly because it comes in half-hour chunks. But I take my time alone where I can get it.
I write in a notebook atop a leather brief case sitting on my lap. The eventual typing up of my chicken scratch becomes an act of revision, with most of those revelatory writing moments coming in the late-night transcription sessions at the keyboard. I actually find the process to be fairly productive, if not ideal.
Lately, as I’ve been rewriting the ending for the novel I’m trying to finish, I’ve felt particularly unplanned and at least frustrated, if not failing. When my agent read the manuscript a few months ago, he said the ending felt a little easy. So I pulled back from the big moment of revelation in the book, and started going sideways a bit. I wrote several new scenes with my man Flood continuing to stumble in the dark.
But I was having trouble finding the final confrontation that will get me back to the end. Trying to major surgery on the plot, I suddenly had no real plan.
This is what brings me to the lessons of Mamet and Claeyssens. Without thinking about it the other day, I started retroactively writing out preliminaries on the train. I’m once again finding my way through with the preliminaries.
Looking forward, I’m pretty sure I’m going to need preliminaries for the next book, too. I have a premise and protagonist, a couple of scenes, but the big picture remains a fog. I’m going to need serious plan.
Monday, June 07, 2010
DID DREW PLAY IN PEORIA?
By David Heinzmann, who can't seem to fathom the technical complexity of Blogger, today...
David Alwan was hustling around Peoria, Illinois on Friday, making all the last-minute arrangements for the grand opening of his new restaurant, when he got a phone call from the FBI. A couple dozen investigators were on hand and they thought a murderer had buried a woman’s body on his farm just north of town.
And they wanted permission to start digging.
And not just any body. They were looking for Stacy Peterson, the third wife of former Bolingbrook police officer Drew Peterson, who’s murder trial for the death of his second wife is about to start next month.
Alwan, whose family has been prominent in the food service business in Peoria for decades, had never met Drew Peterson, and he was floored. But the investigators explained that they had a tip the body was buried near a gun club and shooting range, which happens to be surrounded on three sides by Alwan’s farm. A team of dogs trained to sniff out human remains had gone crazy for a little patch of pasture on his rustic spread of fields and timber along the Kickapoo Creek.
So soon the investigators were digging by hand. They dug all day Saturday but found nothing. No mysterious blue barrel that Peterson was supposed to have been seen loading into his vehicle. Not even the remains of a deer carcass. This week they’ll come back with scanning equipment to try to pinpoint what the dogs smelled.
Is this it? Will the crime be solved on the banks of the Kickapoo Creek, a two-hour drive from the suburbs where Peterson and his wife lived? We don’t know.
The tip about the gun club location allegedly came from some kind of mysterious “jailhouse informant,” which set off all kinds of speculation and denials because Peterson has been in solitary confinement since he was arrested in the murder of his second wife, Kathleen Savio. His defense lawyers have mocked the tip as a red herring and a publicity stunt by prosecutors who aren’t confident they can convict Peterson in the Savio case.
As I’ve noted before I grew up around Peoria. Mr. Alwan and I know a lot of the same people, and I grew up eating steaks from his family’s Alwan Brothers Meats Co. So it wasn’t a shocker that I was drawn into working on this story this weekend, albeit from home because I was alone with two little kids while my wife attended a bridal shower for my niece in… Peoria.
Anyway, Sunday morning I was sitting on the front porch drinking coffee and reading emails when I received a note from a reader who said the story reminded him of a TV plot he’d seen once. He had a theory on what happened out on that farm in Peoria. It was a pretty intriguing theory. Sorry, my journalist’s hat won’t let me speculate about guilt or innocence, so I won’t go into the details. But I’ll invite Outfit readers to tap their mystery-thriller instincts and offer up some ideas of their own. What’s buried out there amid the alfalfa and oak trees on the banks of the Kickapoo, and how did it get there?
You fill in the blanks…
One postscript: I am securely and happily on the Blackhawks bandwagon. After last night’s blazing and bruising win over the Flyers, the Stanley Cup is within reach. And I’ve gone from a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about hockey to shouting at the TV as clocks run out amid frantic, frenzied scrambles around the net. And every time Antti Niemi drops on his ass and splays his legs and skates and pads trying to stop the puck I think of Gus Carpenter, the tragic-heroic goalie and newsman-sleuth in Bryan’s Starvation Lake.
David Alwan was hustling around Peoria, Illinois on Friday, making all the last-minute arrangements for the grand opening of his new restaurant, when he got a phone call from the FBI. A couple dozen investigators were on hand and they thought a murderer had buried a woman’s body on his farm just north of town.
And they wanted permission to start digging.
And not just any body. They were looking for Stacy Peterson, the third wife of former Bolingbrook police officer Drew Peterson, who’s murder trial for the death of his second wife is about to start next month.
Alwan, whose family has been prominent in the food service business in Peoria for decades, had never met Drew Peterson, and he was floored. But the investigators explained that they had a tip the body was buried near a gun club and shooting range, which happens to be surrounded on three sides by Alwan’s farm. A team of dogs trained to sniff out human remains had gone crazy for a little patch of pasture on his rustic spread of fields and timber along the Kickapoo Creek.
So soon the investigators were digging by hand. They dug all day Saturday but found nothing. No mysterious blue barrel that Peterson was supposed to have been seen loading into his vehicle. Not even the remains of a deer carcass. This week they’ll come back with scanning equipment to try to pinpoint what the dogs smelled.
Is this it? Will the crime be solved on the banks of the Kickapoo Creek, a two-hour drive from the suburbs where Peterson and his wife lived? We don’t know.
The tip about the gun club location allegedly came from some kind of mysterious “jailhouse informant,” which set off all kinds of speculation and denials because Peterson has been in solitary confinement since he was arrested in the murder of his second wife, Kathleen Savio. His defense lawyers have mocked the tip as a red herring and a publicity stunt by prosecutors who aren’t confident they can convict Peterson in the Savio case.
As I’ve noted before I grew up around Peoria. Mr. Alwan and I know a lot of the same people, and I grew up eating steaks from his family’s Alwan Brothers Meats Co. So it wasn’t a shocker that I was drawn into working on this story this weekend, albeit from home because I was alone with two little kids while my wife attended a bridal shower for my niece in… Peoria.
Anyway, Sunday morning I was sitting on the front porch drinking coffee and reading emails when I received a note from a reader who said the story reminded him of a TV plot he’d seen once. He had a theory on what happened out on that farm in Peoria. It was a pretty intriguing theory. Sorry, my journalist’s hat won’t let me speculate about guilt or innocence, so I won’t go into the details. But I’ll invite Outfit readers to tap their mystery-thriller instincts and offer up some ideas of their own. What’s buried out there amid the alfalfa and oak trees on the banks of the Kickapoo, and how did it get there?
You fill in the blanks…
One postscript: I am securely and happily on the Blackhawks bandwagon. After last night’s blazing and bruising win over the Flyers, the Stanley Cup is within reach. And I’ve gone from a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about hockey to shouting at the TV as clocks run out amid frantic, frenzied scrambles around the net. And every time Antti Niemi drops on his ass and splays his legs and skates and pads trying to stop the puck I think of Gus Carpenter, the tragic-heroic goalie and newsman-sleuth in Bryan’s Starvation Lake.
Monday, May 24, 2010
The Mayhem Roundup
By David Heinzmann
I was sitting at the Tribune’s city desk the other day with my boss, working on a story I was writing, when the editor next to us hung up the phone and said, more or less, you’re not going to believe this.
Mayor Daley just told a reporter he was going to stick a gun up a reporter’s "butt" and pull the trigger. And it’s on tape.
City Hall reporters apparently huddled around their tape recorders for several minutes after the mayor’s press conference listening over and over again in a bit of disbelief. Did he really say that? Is it really possible?
So then Saturday afternoon a cop called me as I was driving home from the Niles library’s The Big Read event (where I’d appeared with fellow Outfitters Libby Hellman and Newsman Gruley, as well as friends of the Outfit, Sam Reaves, Bob Goldsborough and Luisa Buehler). You should ask whether he committed a crime, the cop said.
Certain forms of intimidation are against the law, after all, and when a person of such authority is waving a gun in the air, well…
Except it was a press conference and everybody in the room has a strong presumption the gun was unloaded and, um, it was Daley.
Anyway, this is a measure of how much the cops in this city can’t stand the mayor of this city. What’s worse, the Daley sideshow happened on the day after an off-duty Chicago police officer was murdered when four knuckleheads tried to rob him of his motorcycle at gunpoint in front of his father’s house and across the street from the park the cop has pledged to rid of gang violence. Cops believed Daley was trying to make political hay out of a police officer's death in his effort to see a gun ban in the city upheld.
It’s an absolutely awful story told amazingly here by my colleague, Annie Sweenie. By coincidence she had interviewed Thomas Wortham IV a week before about his efforts to take back Cole Park from the gangbangers encroaching from different neighborhoods.
One of the strange realities of newspaper journalism is that sometimes we do our best work writing about the most tragic circumstances.
At this point, I’m reminded of Laura’s post a few days ago about what a hell of a summer it’s going to be with all these trials—Burge (the police torturer), Blago (our most recent indicted governor) and Drew Peterson (our collective offering to the Tabloid TV gods)—unfolding.
They’re picking the Burge jury starting today and USA vs. Blagojevich is right around the corner.
When I used to work Sundays in the newsroom I’d invariably get assigned to write the “mayhem roundup,” which was a shortish story combining all of the shootings and crime that we couldn't fit into the paper on their own into one tidy story. The mayhem story was a reflection of the fact that there was just too much death and destruction in the city day after day to write a story about each tragedy.
This summer is really shaping up into a Mount Olympus of mayhem roundups. There’s just too much to pay attention to. All the trials Laura mentioned, plus a murder rate creeping back up – seems like there’s a car found with three bound, gagged and executed bodies in it every other day—plus the daily dramas of the Daley Show, plus a bunch of juicy political races, including U.S Senate and governor. (Hey, everybody, Scott Lee Cohen is back! Running for guv, and this time he’s got former Gangster Disciples honcho “Wallace Gator” Bradley on his side!)
It’s like a stimulus package for the news business. So buy a newspaper, grab a cup of coffee and a donut, and read all about it.
One postscript: last time, I blogged about heading off on my annual fishing trip in northern Wisconsin. Praise the Maker, I got no speeding tickets this time. The actual fishing was godawful, but no matter, I gained five pounds in beer and venison weight, and thoroughly enjoyed both books on tape that I checked out of the library. Michael Connelly’s The Closers on the way up, and then le Carre’s Mission Song on the way back. Actually, I’m not finished with the second one, so I’m still driving around town listening to it here and there. The narration by an actor named David Oyelowo, is really out of this world.
I was sitting at the Tribune’s city desk the other day with my boss, working on a story I was writing, when the editor next to us hung up the phone and said, more or less, you’re not going to believe this.
Mayor Daley just told a reporter he was going to stick a gun up a reporter’s "butt" and pull the trigger. And it’s on tape.
City Hall reporters apparently huddled around their tape recorders for several minutes after the mayor’s press conference listening over and over again in a bit of disbelief. Did he really say that? Is it really possible?
So then Saturday afternoon a cop called me as I was driving home from the Niles library’s The Big Read event (where I’d appeared with fellow Outfitters Libby Hellman and Newsman Gruley, as well as friends of the Outfit, Sam Reaves, Bob Goldsborough and Luisa Buehler). You should ask whether he committed a crime, the cop said.
Certain forms of intimidation are against the law, after all, and when a person of such authority is waving a gun in the air, well…
Except it was a press conference and everybody in the room has a strong presumption the gun was unloaded and, um, it was Daley.
Anyway, this is a measure of how much the cops in this city can’t stand the mayor of this city. What’s worse, the Daley sideshow happened on the day after an off-duty Chicago police officer was murdered when four knuckleheads tried to rob him of his motorcycle at gunpoint in front of his father’s house and across the street from the park the cop has pledged to rid of gang violence. Cops believed Daley was trying to make political hay out of a police officer's death in his effort to see a gun ban in the city upheld.
It’s an absolutely awful story told amazingly here by my colleague, Annie Sweenie. By coincidence she had interviewed Thomas Wortham IV a week before about his efforts to take back Cole Park from the gangbangers encroaching from different neighborhoods.
One of the strange realities of newspaper journalism is that sometimes we do our best work writing about the most tragic circumstances.
At this point, I’m reminded of Laura’s post a few days ago about what a hell of a summer it’s going to be with all these trials—Burge (the police torturer), Blago (our most recent indicted governor) and Drew Peterson (our collective offering to the Tabloid TV gods)—unfolding.
They’re picking the Burge jury starting today and USA vs. Blagojevich is right around the corner.
When I used to work Sundays in the newsroom I’d invariably get assigned to write the “mayhem roundup,” which was a shortish story combining all of the shootings and crime that we couldn't fit into the paper on their own into one tidy story. The mayhem story was a reflection of the fact that there was just too much death and destruction in the city day after day to write a story about each tragedy.
This summer is really shaping up into a Mount Olympus of mayhem roundups. There’s just too much to pay attention to. All the trials Laura mentioned, plus a murder rate creeping back up – seems like there’s a car found with three bound, gagged and executed bodies in it every other day—plus the daily dramas of the Daley Show, plus a bunch of juicy political races, including U.S Senate and governor. (Hey, everybody, Scott Lee Cohen is back! Running for guv, and this time he’s got former Gangster Disciples honcho “Wallace Gator” Bradley on his side!)
It’s like a stimulus package for the news business. So buy a newspaper, grab a cup of coffee and a donut, and read all about it.
One postscript: last time, I blogged about heading off on my annual fishing trip in northern Wisconsin. Praise the Maker, I got no speeding tickets this time. The actual fishing was godawful, but no matter, I gained five pounds in beer and venison weight, and thoroughly enjoyed both books on tape that I checked out of the library. Michael Connelly’s The Closers on the way up, and then le Carre’s Mission Song on the way back. Actually, I’m not finished with the second one, so I’m still driving around town listening to it here and there. The narration by an actor named David Oyelowo, is really out of this world.
Monday, November 22, 2010
The credibility of the story
By David Heinzmann
When I was invited to talk to my kid’s kindergarten class last week about being a reporter, I decided the best way to explain journalism to a bunch of six-year-olds was to tell them that I tell stories for a living.
But not just any kind of story, of course. I told them there are two kinds of tales in this world: those that are make-believe and those that really happened.
As a reporter, I tell the ones that really happened.
I showed the kids my digital voice recorder (always use a prop of some kind when trying to hold the attention of the shorties) and told them I use it so that the words of people in my stories are down just exactly as they said them. No foggy recollections of what was said. Nothing made up.
When I asked for an example of a story they know that really happened, one little girl raised her hand and blurted out “The Titanic.” Excellent. However, given that my own 6-year-old is pretty sure that certain heroic events really did happen A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away… I probably should have asked them for an example of a story they knew was made up. That’s harder. We all want to believe on some level that these stories we hear or read could really be true, right? Otherwise, who cares.
By the way, bless these children—and their parents—because when I asked for a show of hands if an actual newspaper gets delivered to their front door every morning, nearly all of them went up. (which says more about my zip code than the future of print journalism. But still.) I was presently surprised by the notions they’ve formed at such a young age about the nature of stories.
After drilling them on the importance for a journalist to make sure everything it true, I figured it better to not open any cans of worms about the fictional side of my writing life. I had only twenty minutes with them, and their desire to hear their own voices played back on my fancy little digital recorder had created a bit of a frenzy ten minutes in.
But I’m always pre-occupied with this issue of make-believe and factual reality, and how they mix in writing. Both as a writer and a reader. Can a nonfiction book that takes liberties to “reconstruct” conversations and events really be regarded as truth? And does a novel really benefit from a writer’s care to get some facts of the real word just write in the book? In crime stories, I think the geography should be right, for the most part, and the criminal justice system should be represented somewhat accurately. But maybe the reporter side of me is fooling the novelist side about what really matters.
Part of me wants to believe this level accuracy helps a story reflect some central sense of truth. It’s not just make-believe. But then again, truth isn’t dependent on the accuracy of the street signs or cop nomenclature. Real truth in fiction comes from characters readers can believe in.
When I was invited to talk to my kid’s kindergarten class last week about being a reporter, I decided the best way to explain journalism to a bunch of six-year-olds was to tell them that I tell stories for a living.
But not just any kind of story, of course. I told them there are two kinds of tales in this world: those that are make-believe and those that really happened.
As a reporter, I tell the ones that really happened.
I showed the kids my digital voice recorder (always use a prop of some kind when trying to hold the attention of the shorties) and told them I use it so that the words of people in my stories are down just exactly as they said them. No foggy recollections of what was said. Nothing made up.
When I asked for an example of a story they know that really happened, one little girl raised her hand and blurted out “The Titanic.” Excellent. However, given that my own 6-year-old is pretty sure that certain heroic events really did happen A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away… I probably should have asked them for an example of a story they knew was made up. That’s harder. We all want to believe on some level that these stories we hear or read could really be true, right? Otherwise, who cares.
By the way, bless these children—and their parents—because when I asked for a show of hands if an actual newspaper gets delivered to their front door every morning, nearly all of them went up. (which says more about my zip code than the future of print journalism. But still.) I was presently surprised by the notions they’ve formed at such a young age about the nature of stories.
After drilling them on the importance for a journalist to make sure everything it true, I figured it better to not open any cans of worms about the fictional side of my writing life. I had only twenty minutes with them, and their desire to hear their own voices played back on my fancy little digital recorder had created a bit of a frenzy ten minutes in.
But I’m always pre-occupied with this issue of make-believe and factual reality, and how they mix in writing. Both as a writer and a reader. Can a nonfiction book that takes liberties to “reconstruct” conversations and events really be regarded as truth? And does a novel really benefit from a writer’s care to get some facts of the real word just write in the book? In crime stories, I think the geography should be right, for the most part, and the criminal justice system should be represented somewhat accurately. But maybe the reporter side of me is fooling the novelist side about what really matters.
Part of me wants to believe this level accuracy helps a story reflect some central sense of truth. It’s not just make-believe. But then again, truth isn’t dependent on the accuracy of the street signs or cop nomenclature. Real truth in fiction comes from characters readers can believe in.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Wonder and terror
By David Heinzmann
In 2003, I covered a story for the Tribune about the arrest of a group of South Siders accused of pimping teenage girls they had coerced into a prostitution ring that traveled a circuit of Midwestern cities. The story caught the attention of the then-editor of the Tribune, who sent an order from on high for me to find out everything I could about child prostitution.
Over the next several months, the project became a constant pot simmering on the back burner of my cops beat. I built relationships with advocates for abused kids, went to court hearings in Detroit, a conference on prostituted children in Washington, and interviewed several teenage girls who told me horrifying stories of being passed around at gang parties, pimped by their junkie fathers, a litany of heartbreaking miseries.
I learned more than I wanted to know about children in the sex trade in Chicago and beyond. But in the meantime, the editor of the paper moved on to other interests, and my immediate editor took a jaundiced view toward the story—old news, who cares—so most the contents of my notebooks weren’t making it into the paper. It was frustrating and disappointing.
But—you’ll never see this coming—my reportorial frustration eventually cut a new channel in the dirt, and the source of a novel began to trickle forth. (My second, which comes out next year.) At about the same time, I was sent to Las Vegas on an unrelated wild goose chase of a story. While I was there the child prostitution idea percolated in my head. During the course of that unused reporting, I had become familiar with a Vegas cop who specialized in child prostitution cases, and it’s hardly shocking that Las Vegas is a hub for the underage sex trade.
And then in 2004, I made a couple of trips to Memphis and Mississippi to write about Chicago gangs who ran pipelines of guns from Delta pawnshops back to Chicago by the trunk-load. The long roots of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans still connected to the Delta fascinated me.
This stew of settings and situations eventually cooked into the narrative of a book. It was a very different experience from the beginnings of my first book, A Word to the Wise, which started with a character and me searching for a story to illuminate him. Or the third book, which I’m working on now, which probably was seeded by my early failings as a police reporter and the moment when I learned who really was running the Chicago Police Department behind the scenes.
One of my favorite genesis stories for a novel was Vladimir Nabokov’s account of how Lolita was inspired. He claimed he was convalescing for some ailment in a Paris hospital and read a story about zoologists who had taught a chimp how to draw with pencil and paper—and the first thing the ape drew was the bars of his cage. I don’t know if any Nabokov scholar has ever tracked down that newspaper story to see if it really exists, but it’s a marvelous literature of its own about the birth of Humbert Humbert.
This anecdote isn’t just a ridiculous ploy to place myself next to one of the literary geniuses of the 20th Century. Books come from all kinds of moments in our minds—a single impression, a series of experiences that have affected us deeply, a hunger to answer what if questions. These different kinds of beginnings deeply influence how were write our stories.
In this forthcoming book, Throwaway Girl, I was haunted by the places I had been and the people I had met. Those experiences gave me a visceral road map for how to write the book, which was its own challenge. A writer like me, with a day job as a journalist, has to be ever wary of losing himself in the reporting, and staying focused on harnessing my imagination in the direction of suspense and surprise.
With this third book, which was inspired by more of a little spark, I feel much more like I’m starting from scratch. The lifting is a little heavier.
Every time out is different, and that’s a good bit of the wonder and terror of being a writer.
In 2003, I covered a story for the Tribune about the arrest of a group of South Siders accused of pimping teenage girls they had coerced into a prostitution ring that traveled a circuit of Midwestern cities. The story caught the attention of the then-editor of the Tribune, who sent an order from on high for me to find out everything I could about child prostitution.
Over the next several months, the project became a constant pot simmering on the back burner of my cops beat. I built relationships with advocates for abused kids, went to court hearings in Detroit, a conference on prostituted children in Washington, and interviewed several teenage girls who told me horrifying stories of being passed around at gang parties, pimped by their junkie fathers, a litany of heartbreaking miseries.
I learned more than I wanted to know about children in the sex trade in Chicago and beyond. But in the meantime, the editor of the paper moved on to other interests, and my immediate editor took a jaundiced view toward the story—old news, who cares—so most the contents of my notebooks weren’t making it into the paper. It was frustrating and disappointing.
But—you’ll never see this coming—my reportorial frustration eventually cut a new channel in the dirt, and the source of a novel began to trickle forth. (My second, which comes out next year.) At about the same time, I was sent to Las Vegas on an unrelated wild goose chase of a story. While I was there the child prostitution idea percolated in my head. During the course of that unused reporting, I had become familiar with a Vegas cop who specialized in child prostitution cases, and it’s hardly shocking that Las Vegas is a hub for the underage sex trade.
And then in 2004, I made a couple of trips to Memphis and Mississippi to write about Chicago gangs who ran pipelines of guns from Delta pawnshops back to Chicago by the trunk-load. The long roots of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans still connected to the Delta fascinated me.
This stew of settings and situations eventually cooked into the narrative of a book. It was a very different experience from the beginnings of my first book, A Word to the Wise, which started with a character and me searching for a story to illuminate him. Or the third book, which I’m working on now, which probably was seeded by my early failings as a police reporter and the moment when I learned who really was running the Chicago Police Department behind the scenes.
One of my favorite genesis stories for a novel was Vladimir Nabokov’s account of how Lolita was inspired. He claimed he was convalescing for some ailment in a Paris hospital and read a story about zoologists who had taught a chimp how to draw with pencil and paper—and the first thing the ape drew was the bars of his cage. I don’t know if any Nabokov scholar has ever tracked down that newspaper story to see if it really exists, but it’s a marvelous literature of its own about the birth of Humbert Humbert.
This anecdote isn’t just a ridiculous ploy to place myself next to one of the literary geniuses of the 20th Century. Books come from all kinds of moments in our minds—a single impression, a series of experiences that have affected us deeply, a hunger to answer what if questions. These different kinds of beginnings deeply influence how were write our stories.
In this forthcoming book, Throwaway Girl, I was haunted by the places I had been and the people I had met. Those experiences gave me a visceral road map for how to write the book, which was its own challenge. A writer like me, with a day job as a journalist, has to be ever wary of losing himself in the reporting, and staying focused on harnessing my imagination in the direction of suspense and surprise.
With this third book, which was inspired by more of a little spark, I feel much more like I’m starting from scratch. The lifting is a little heavier.
Every time out is different, and that’s a good bit of the wonder and terror of being a writer.
Monday, September 21, 2009
The endgame is in sight
By David Heinzmann
A cop sent me a text message last Thursday morning asking whether I’d heard that some former Special Operation Section officers had just turned themselves in at the First District station. Immediately, I knew this would blow up my day at the Trib, where I and three other reporters have been busting our butts working on stories about Chicago’s Olympic bid.
I don’t cover the Chicago Police Department anymore, but this SOS scandal was a nearly full-time job for a couple years, and it’s not finished, so it’s still my case to cover.
Three years ago when the SOS scandal broke, there were seven cops charged with running a robbery and home invasion ring that netted them hundreds of thousands of dollars. They started out ripping off drug dealers—allegedly—but ended up preying on anybody who kept cash on hand and would think twice about complaining to the authorities (Read: undocumented Mexicans.)
I knew the case was big when I first heard all the charges back in September 2006. But the detail that really illustrated the magnitude of the SOS scandal was the news a few weeks into the case that more than a dozen officers were cooperating with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s investigation, including testifying before a grand jury.
Getting cops to testify against each other is no easy task. Getting a dozen to do it means something enormous is going on. Eventually the U.S. attorney and the FBI took over the SOS investigation.
So that text message last week was my first sign that the investigation is finally coming to a head. A couple hours later we were able to report that some of those dozen or so cooperating cops were finally surfacing. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-sos-plea-deals-18-sep18,0,5318911.story They all made deals with prosecutors back in 2006 that once the investigation was complete, they’d be charged in the case, plead guilty and get lenient sentences in exchange for their cooperation.
Four of them closed their deals last week—getting charged on Thursday and pleading guilty on Friday. Six months in jail, probation for a few years, their pensions gone. We hear there may be more in the coming weeks, and then the federal indictments will finally start coming down in the case. If there are convictions in federal court the sentences are likely to run into decades. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-sos-chargedsep20,0,1659077.story
It’s hard for a scandal to hold the public’s attention very long in this day and age, and Chicago has more than its share of malfeasance and corruption to offer new distractions. But this SOS mess is really a monster of a case. Its tentacles cost the last superintendent his job, prompted Mayor Daley to bring in an ex-FBI honcho whom the rank and file really hate. The case also has waylaid the careers of several cops who didn’t really do anything wrong.
I wrote about it here a couple months ago when some of the cops who got caught up in the fringes of the case got their badges back after two years of humiliating desk jobs. But the internal affairs investigator who tried to blow the whistle on the scandal back in 2004—Bridget McLaughlin--remains stripped of her police powers and answering phones for reasons that have never been clear.
The feds got into the case because there was some evidence that police brass were covering up for the SOS officers, ignoring the fact that over several years hundreds of people were making almost identical complaints—Officer Jerry Finnigan and others on his team were arresting them without cause, and then ransacking their cars and homes looking for drugs, guns and money. They’d write phony police reports to make it all look OK, and if they found money most of it would disappear.
One night Finnigan and two of the men who pleaded guilty last week caught a drug dealer with $450,000 in cash. They split it three ways—each man taking home $150,000 in cash that night, according to the two officers’ confessions. More than twice their annual salaries for each of them. In cash. In one night.
When I was writing about SOS regularly, people would always come up to me and say, “Do you watch ‘The Shield’? This is just like ‘The Shield.’” I never really watched the “The Shield” but I know the TV show was loosely based on the Rampart scandal in the LAPD. And I know that this SOS scandal is sort of like Rampart. Only bigger.
Most of the time their victims were Hispanic gang members, but somewhere along the way they started preying on people who weren’t crooks. Many of the court documents I’ve combed through show immigrant laborers, pulled over and handcuffed and then interrogated about where they kept cash. While they were held, some of the officers would ransack their houses while their families looked on in terror. They’d take cash, tools, anything of value. It went on for years.
Whenever I dig too deep into the SOS stuff, I have to take a step back and think about some of the cops I’ve met over the years covering the beat. The cops who are working side jobs and scrounging for overtime to pay Catholic school tuition.
I think of the cops who work in some of the most violent neighborhoods in America, the ones who show up at one murder scene after another trying solve crimes, trying restore some sense of law and order to the streets of Chicago. They’re the ones who see the drug money, who make the arrests and have the chance to stick a little in their pockets, but instead make sure every penny of it gets inventoried at the end of the night.
They’re the cops who say they’re fed up with this city, the hypocrisy and the corruption and the completely debased lives led by too many of its residents. They say they’ve had and they’re thinking about taking a soft job on some suburban department. Or moving out West.
But at the end of the day I know most of them can’t really imagine leaving this mess—and the job--behind. It’s the only family they’ve got.
A cop sent me a text message last Thursday morning asking whether I’d heard that some former Special Operation Section officers had just turned themselves in at the First District station. Immediately, I knew this would blow up my day at the Trib, where I and three other reporters have been busting our butts working on stories about Chicago’s Olympic bid.
I don’t cover the Chicago Police Department anymore, but this SOS scandal was a nearly full-time job for a couple years, and it’s not finished, so it’s still my case to cover.
Three years ago when the SOS scandal broke, there were seven cops charged with running a robbery and home invasion ring that netted them hundreds of thousands of dollars. They started out ripping off drug dealers—allegedly—but ended up preying on anybody who kept cash on hand and would think twice about complaining to the authorities (Read: undocumented Mexicans.)
I knew the case was big when I first heard all the charges back in September 2006. But the detail that really illustrated the magnitude of the SOS scandal was the news a few weeks into the case that more than a dozen officers were cooperating with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s investigation, including testifying before a grand jury.
Getting cops to testify against each other is no easy task. Getting a dozen to do it means something enormous is going on. Eventually the U.S. attorney and the FBI took over the SOS investigation.
So that text message last week was my first sign that the investigation is finally coming to a head. A couple hours later we were able to report that some of those dozen or so cooperating cops were finally surfacing. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-sos-plea-deals-18-sep18,0,5318911.story They all made deals with prosecutors back in 2006 that once the investigation was complete, they’d be charged in the case, plead guilty and get lenient sentences in exchange for their cooperation.
Four of them closed their deals last week—getting charged on Thursday and pleading guilty on Friday. Six months in jail, probation for a few years, their pensions gone. We hear there may be more in the coming weeks, and then the federal indictments will finally start coming down in the case. If there are convictions in federal court the sentences are likely to run into decades. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-sos-chargedsep20,0,1659077.story
It’s hard for a scandal to hold the public’s attention very long in this day and age, and Chicago has more than its share of malfeasance and corruption to offer new distractions. But this SOS mess is really a monster of a case. Its tentacles cost the last superintendent his job, prompted Mayor Daley to bring in an ex-FBI honcho whom the rank and file really hate. The case also has waylaid the careers of several cops who didn’t really do anything wrong.
I wrote about it here a couple months ago when some of the cops who got caught up in the fringes of the case got their badges back after two years of humiliating desk jobs. But the internal affairs investigator who tried to blow the whistle on the scandal back in 2004—Bridget McLaughlin--remains stripped of her police powers and answering phones for reasons that have never been clear.
The feds got into the case because there was some evidence that police brass were covering up for the SOS officers, ignoring the fact that over several years hundreds of people were making almost identical complaints—Officer Jerry Finnigan and others on his team were arresting them without cause, and then ransacking their cars and homes looking for drugs, guns and money. They’d write phony police reports to make it all look OK, and if they found money most of it would disappear.
One night Finnigan and two of the men who pleaded guilty last week caught a drug dealer with $450,000 in cash. They split it three ways—each man taking home $150,000 in cash that night, according to the two officers’ confessions. More than twice their annual salaries for each of them. In cash. In one night.
When I was writing about SOS regularly, people would always come up to me and say, “Do you watch ‘The Shield’? This is just like ‘The Shield.’” I never really watched the “The Shield” but I know the TV show was loosely based on the Rampart scandal in the LAPD. And I know that this SOS scandal is sort of like Rampart. Only bigger.
Most of the time their victims were Hispanic gang members, but somewhere along the way they started preying on people who weren’t crooks. Many of the court documents I’ve combed through show immigrant laborers, pulled over and handcuffed and then interrogated about where they kept cash. While they were held, some of the officers would ransack their houses while their families looked on in terror. They’d take cash, tools, anything of value. It went on for years.
Whenever I dig too deep into the SOS stuff, I have to take a step back and think about some of the cops I’ve met over the years covering the beat. The cops who are working side jobs and scrounging for overtime to pay Catholic school tuition.
I think of the cops who work in some of the most violent neighborhoods in America, the ones who show up at one murder scene after another trying solve crimes, trying restore some sense of law and order to the streets of Chicago. They’re the ones who see the drug money, who make the arrests and have the chance to stick a little in their pockets, but instead make sure every penny of it gets inventoried at the end of the night.
They’re the cops who say they’re fed up with this city, the hypocrisy and the corruption and the completely debased lives led by too many of its residents. They say they’ve had and they’re thinking about taking a soft job on some suburban department. Or moving out West.
But at the end of the day I know most of them can’t really imagine leaving this mess—and the job--behind. It’s the only family they’ve got.
Monday, March 01, 2010
Can you go home again?
By David Heinzmann
There’s a two-lane road that runs north out of Peoria, cutting through miles of black dirt that was wide-open cropland when I was a teenager growing up in the area.
I think I drove it just once back then, plodding along warily in the darkness behind the wheel of my little Plymouth, looking for the turnoff to a pasture where some kid I barely knew had spread the word of a party—a keg of beer, a sleeve of plastic cups and a bunch of kids stumbling around in the weeds getting drunk, separated by miles of emptiness from the nearest parent or patrol car.
Today, that road is a main thoroughfare through the heart of Peoria’s subdivision sprawl. It’s not far from my in-laws’ home and I drove it over the weekend while I was in town for a book signing. Thousands of new homes have blanketed the rolling landscape over the last decade, and new schools have sprouted while the old downtown schools decay or close. This new growth is the winning end of that fine old riverfront town’s hollowing out into a bifurcated mess of haves and have-nots.
My idea of Peoria has changed a lot over the years, and some of it not for the better. My shabby old Catholic high school—which brought together kids from all walks of life in a broken down campus of historic buildings—is gone. The motorboat that I used to steer up and down the wide, muddy channel of the Illinois River has long since been donated to charity. But mostly, I have changed and am not the kid I was back then. If the old me doesn’t exist, neither does the place in which I was young.
The first book I wrote, which I began in college, was a lousily autobiographical story about a young man losing his hold on the idea of home. Midwestern boy goes east to college. Boy comes home after college. Boy realizes he’s changed and home isn’t really home anymore.
I thought I was Fitzgerald. But I was really just lost. I didn’t know how to write that story then (its dusty pages reside right here in a drawer), and I don’t think I would know how to write it now.
Years ago I asked a writer friend in Chicago, who happens to also be from Peoria, whether he ever wrote about our hometown. He said, goodness, no. He set all of his stories in the cities of his adulthood.
I haven’t done it, either. I write about Chicago and crime—the experiences of my adulthood. I notice that most of us in the Outfit are writing about an adopted place, as well. And most of the crime novelists whose work I admire also write about places far from where they were raised. There’s something about being an observer looking in. And exploring a new place and discovering what makes it tick.
This has been a fairly long way around to a question--and I apologize for my self-indulgence--but I’d be interested in other writers’ thoughts about the differences in writing about the places that we come from versus writing about the places we’ve come to.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Port-au-Prince in darkness
By David Heinzmann
First of all, I’ll be Centuries & Sleuths on Madison Street in Forest Park at 2 p.m. next Sunday, Jan. 24, signing copies of A Word to the Wise. Please stop by.
So, I was at a dinner party over the weekend and my host asked me if I’d ever feared for my life because someone I’d written about had threatened me. He was a little surprised when I said no, but the truth is that by the time I get to writing about killers, drug dealers or dirty cops, with a few exceptions, they already have some much heat on them that I’m the least of their worries.
Probably the scariest things I’ve had to do as a reporter have been venturing into high-crime areas of the city at night to try to talk to people. Once when I was working on a series of stories about whether the police department had covered up numerous bad officer-involved shootings, I had to drive to a rough part of the South Side late at night and bang on the door of a cop who had shot a kid several times in the head after he tried to steal her car. She had ignored all of our phone calls and day-time visits and we needed to exhaust all avenues of trying to get her to talk about what happened before we published. I volunteered to go. Nothing happened, of course. I knocked. She shouted at me from the other side of the door and then told me to get lost. (Later, the Cook County State's Attorney's office re-opened the investigation of the shooting based on our reporting.)
Anyway, the question at dinner got me to thinking about the times that I’ve experienced real fear. Like most of us, I suspect, my scariest moments were venturing into the unknown, being taken out of my familiar surroundings and forced to make decisions that could have life-or-death consequences. Lost in the woods at dusk. An out of control car coming at you: do you brake or accelerate to get out of the way? That sort of thing.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about Haiti in the last week after the horrible earthquake that has managed to afflict the Haitian people with new levels of misery. And one of the more vividly frightening moments of my life happened there more than a decade ago. It was all about the unknown.
I went to Haiti in 1997 with fairly ill-defined purposes. Part tourist. Part would-be journalist. All wide-eyed and ignorant.
The cheapest and best place I found to stay was a mission run by a bunch of fearless nuns from Indiana. The Hospice St. Joseph, a walled compound on Rue Acacia, was a converted hotel that housed a medical clinic and school, and provided housing for people waiting for surgeries at the nearby hospital. They also took in lodgers. Like every neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, it sat on a crowded hillside packed with shanty dwellings where people cooked over charcoal fires and more or less lived outdoors.
One night one of the sisters, who had not lived there very long, and I decided we were going to the famed Hotel Oloffson for a drink. If you’ve ever read Graham Greene’s The Comedians, (and I recommend you do) the Hotel Trianon is modeled after the Olaffson, a sprawling and genteel gingerbread mansion on the edge of the city center.
We set off in a little four-wheel-drive Nissan down into the darkness. One of the most ominous things about the city was that despite more than two million residents, it was nearly pitch black at night. It is easy to get lost. And we did.
We made wrong turn after wrong turn in a crumbling labyrinth of dark, unmarked streets. If it’s possible to be off the map in the middle of a capital, we had done it. My anxiety grew because I had gotten lost on foot in broad daylight over the preceding days, wandered aimlessly while suspicious eyes watched me. Even then, I had felt that creeping anxiety of “what am I going to do?” if I run into the wrong folks in this country of desperation and violence. Now it was the middle of the night, just me and a middle-aged woman of the cloth who didn’t know her way around.
Finally, we turned into a dead-end, a cul-de-sac of partly collapsed buildings, driving over rubble, our surroundings an abyss outside the feeble glow of the headlights. When we stopped, with nowhere to go, I could sense we were surrounded, dark shapes cautiously moving toward us. They came closer until an expressionless young man stood by the door of the truck. My heart was in my throat. For a moment no one said a thing.
And then he asked in Creole if we were lost. More men came out of the darkness and they shouted at us, helping us make a three-point-turn without blowing a tire. My companion spoke just enough mangled Creole and the young man spoke just enough mangled English to get us back on a main road. We gave up on the Olaffson and headed up into the hills above Port-au-Prince to the luxurious El Rancho Hotel in Petionville. Guards with pistol-gripped shotguns guarded the parking lot. Feeling relieved and foolish, I drank Barbancourt rum and tonic and watched all sorts of shady “business men” in cowboy boots talk deals and smoke Cubans. One guy seemed to be trying to sell telephone poles to the government.
My fear from that night seems quaint now, doesn’t it, given that I don’t know the fate of the Hospice St. Joseph or many of the other places I visited years ago. The earthquake has destroyed much of the city and taken thousands of lives with it.
I feared the unknown there, and found people willing to help. Those suffering in Haiti now know all too well what they face. Their worst fears have been realized. Again.
First of all, I’ll be Centuries & Sleuths on Madison Street in Forest Park at 2 p.m. next Sunday, Jan. 24, signing copies of A Word to the Wise. Please stop by.
So, I was at a dinner party over the weekend and my host asked me if I’d ever feared for my life because someone I’d written about had threatened me. He was a little surprised when I said no, but the truth is that by the time I get to writing about killers, drug dealers or dirty cops, with a few exceptions, they already have some much heat on them that I’m the least of their worries.
Probably the scariest things I’ve had to do as a reporter have been venturing into high-crime areas of the city at night to try to talk to people. Once when I was working on a series of stories about whether the police department had covered up numerous bad officer-involved shootings, I had to drive to a rough part of the South Side late at night and bang on the door of a cop who had shot a kid several times in the head after he tried to steal her car. She had ignored all of our phone calls and day-time visits and we needed to exhaust all avenues of trying to get her to talk about what happened before we published. I volunteered to go. Nothing happened, of course. I knocked. She shouted at me from the other side of the door and then told me to get lost. (Later, the Cook County State's Attorney's office re-opened the investigation of the shooting based on our reporting.)
Anyway, the question at dinner got me to thinking about the times that I’ve experienced real fear. Like most of us, I suspect, my scariest moments were venturing into the unknown, being taken out of my familiar surroundings and forced to make decisions that could have life-or-death consequences. Lost in the woods at dusk. An out of control car coming at you: do you brake or accelerate to get out of the way? That sort of thing.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about Haiti in the last week after the horrible earthquake that has managed to afflict the Haitian people with new levels of misery. And one of the more vividly frightening moments of my life happened there more than a decade ago. It was all about the unknown.
I went to Haiti in 1997 with fairly ill-defined purposes. Part tourist. Part would-be journalist. All wide-eyed and ignorant.
The cheapest and best place I found to stay was a mission run by a bunch of fearless nuns from Indiana. The Hospice St. Joseph, a walled compound on Rue Acacia, was a converted hotel that housed a medical clinic and school, and provided housing for people waiting for surgeries at the nearby hospital. They also took in lodgers. Like every neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, it sat on a crowded hillside packed with shanty dwellings where people cooked over charcoal fires and more or less lived outdoors.
One night one of the sisters, who had not lived there very long, and I decided we were going to the famed Hotel Oloffson for a drink. If you’ve ever read Graham Greene’s The Comedians, (and I recommend you do) the Hotel Trianon is modeled after the Olaffson, a sprawling and genteel gingerbread mansion on the edge of the city center.
We set off in a little four-wheel-drive Nissan down into the darkness. One of the most ominous things about the city was that despite more than two million residents, it was nearly pitch black at night. It is easy to get lost. And we did.
We made wrong turn after wrong turn in a crumbling labyrinth of dark, unmarked streets. If it’s possible to be off the map in the middle of a capital, we had done it. My anxiety grew because I had gotten lost on foot in broad daylight over the preceding days, wandered aimlessly while suspicious eyes watched me. Even then, I had felt that creeping anxiety of “what am I going to do?” if I run into the wrong folks in this country of desperation and violence. Now it was the middle of the night, just me and a middle-aged woman of the cloth who didn’t know her way around.
Finally, we turned into a dead-end, a cul-de-sac of partly collapsed buildings, driving over rubble, our surroundings an abyss outside the feeble glow of the headlights. When we stopped, with nowhere to go, I could sense we were surrounded, dark shapes cautiously moving toward us. They came closer until an expressionless young man stood by the door of the truck. My heart was in my throat. For a moment no one said a thing.
And then he asked in Creole if we were lost. More men came out of the darkness and they shouted at us, helping us make a three-point-turn without blowing a tire. My companion spoke just enough mangled Creole and the young man spoke just enough mangled English to get us back on a main road. We gave up on the Olaffson and headed up into the hills above Port-au-Prince to the luxurious El Rancho Hotel in Petionville. Guards with pistol-gripped shotguns guarded the parking lot. Feeling relieved and foolish, I drank Barbancourt rum and tonic and watched all sorts of shady “business men” in cowboy boots talk deals and smoke Cubans. One guy seemed to be trying to sell telephone poles to the government.
My fear from that night seems quaint now, doesn’t it, given that I don’t know the fate of the Hospice St. Joseph or many of the other places I visited years ago. The earthquake has destroyed much of the city and taken thousands of lives with it.
I feared the unknown there, and found people willing to help. Those suffering in Haiti now know all too well what they face. Their worst fears have been realized. Again.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Scandal, redemption and another year in purgatory
by David Heinzmann
Lately, Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis has been sending a lot of cops who’ve been in trouble back to the streets.
Over the last several weeks at least eight officers who had been stripped of their badges because of links to headline-grabbing scandals—three connected to the Special Operations Section investigation and five who had been involved in the Jefferson Tap videotaped bar beating—have been given their careers back after two years in limbo because Weis decided they had been exonerated to some degree.
This flurry of reinstatements made me wonder if Weis had also tapped Bridget McLaughlin on the shoulder and sent her back to her job as an investigator in the Internal Affairs Division.
So I checked. Nope. She’s still answering phones in the police department’s 311 call center—a purgatory where officers living under a cloud are sent to do no further harm while their fates are decided.
The problem with McLaughlin’s case is that she’s never been accused of doing anything wrong. In fact, several police insiders regard her as something of a whistle-blower in the SOS fiasco. Back in 2004 she was assigned to investigate an allegation that a few of the SOS officers had falsely arrested two Mexican-immigrant factory workers, and then robbed their houses and terrorized their families while the men were in custody. When McLaughlin looked into the case, she found that the same group of cops had hundreds of allegations of almost identical crimes. False arrests. Home invasion. Robbery. But the department had cleared them in almost every case.
She was troubled enough to write a memo to her bosses documenting the number of cases and suggesting that there sure seemed to a pattern there—maybe there was something to all these allegations.
A few days after she wrote that memo, McLaughlin’s boss stripped her of her badge and sent her to the 311 call center. She’s been there ever since. Two years later, Cook County prosecutors charged seven SOS officers with hundreds of crimes just like those in McLaughlin’s memo. Several more officers have been implicated in the crimes, and the feds are still investigating whether there was a cover-up to protect the cops.
Anyway, in 2007 I got hold of McLaughlin’s memo, and a similar one written a few months later by another Internal Affairs investigator, and wrote a few stories for the Tribune revealing what had happened. When I asked police brass back then why McLaughlin was stripped of her badge, they denied she’d been punished for suggesting bosses had been looking the other way, but they acknowledged she was marooned in the 311 call center for “personnel reasons,” not disciplinary reasons.
So, a veteran investigator who’s never been accused of misconduct is in her fifth year answering phone calls that aren’t important enough to merit dialing 911. I’m still trying to make sense of that case.
Much of what I’ve done as a reporter at the Tribune over the last few years has been picking at stories like this one, digging, looking for sources, and trying to explain what’s really going on. Over time, I hope, Tribune readers have a more complex understanding of crime in Chicago.
For all the misery in the newspaper business these days, the job is still a privilege and a profound responsibility. It can also be a real kick in the pants. A couple years ago I spent a whole week crisscrossing the city and banging on doors to track down a list of prostitutes and crack addicts who’d spent the same 24-hour stretch in a South Side women’s lockup. And a few months ago I had a front row seat in a federal courtroom when the arrested governor of Illinois walked in wearing a track suit and looking more than a little out of sorts. I can’t think of another job that affords that variety of experience.
So, every couple weeks on this blog I hope to share some of the color and context that I’ve picked up along the way. Maybe readers find it interesting. Or maybe I’ll be voted off this island in a month. I’ll also be filling you in on my experiences as a first-time novelist. As Libby noted a couple weeks ago, my book, A Word to the Wise comes out in December. While the other nine members of The Outfit are all vets with multiple titles on the shelf, this is my first time out. Many of you will be able to relate, I’m sure.
I hope to have a conversation about crime and writing and whatever else is on readers’ minds. The more comments and questions, the better. I’m really thrilled to be involved and still can’t believe this crew asked me to join them.
Lastly, a plug for my reporter colleague Jeff Coen and for the wonderful Centuries & Sleuths bookstore in Forest Park. Jeff will be there Saturday at 2 p.m. talking and signing copies of his book about the historic Family Secrets mob trial. Don’t miss it.
Lately, Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis has been sending a lot of cops who’ve been in trouble back to the streets.
Over the last several weeks at least eight officers who had been stripped of their badges because of links to headline-grabbing scandals—three connected to the Special Operations Section investigation and five who had been involved in the Jefferson Tap videotaped bar beating—have been given their careers back after two years in limbo because Weis decided they had been exonerated to some degree.
This flurry of reinstatements made me wonder if Weis had also tapped Bridget McLaughlin on the shoulder and sent her back to her job as an investigator in the Internal Affairs Division.
So I checked. Nope. She’s still answering phones in the police department’s 311 call center—a purgatory where officers living under a cloud are sent to do no further harm while their fates are decided.
The problem with McLaughlin’s case is that she’s never been accused of doing anything wrong. In fact, several police insiders regard her as something of a whistle-blower in the SOS fiasco. Back in 2004 she was assigned to investigate an allegation that a few of the SOS officers had falsely arrested two Mexican-immigrant factory workers, and then robbed their houses and terrorized their families while the men were in custody. When McLaughlin looked into the case, she found that the same group of cops had hundreds of allegations of almost identical crimes. False arrests. Home invasion. Robbery. But the department had cleared them in almost every case.
She was troubled enough to write a memo to her bosses documenting the number of cases and suggesting that there sure seemed to a pattern there—maybe there was something to all these allegations.
A few days after she wrote that memo, McLaughlin’s boss stripped her of her badge and sent her to the 311 call center. She’s been there ever since. Two years later, Cook County prosecutors charged seven SOS officers with hundreds of crimes just like those in McLaughlin’s memo. Several more officers have been implicated in the crimes, and the feds are still investigating whether there was a cover-up to protect the cops.
Anyway, in 2007 I got hold of McLaughlin’s memo, and a similar one written a few months later by another Internal Affairs investigator, and wrote a few stories for the Tribune revealing what had happened. When I asked police brass back then why McLaughlin was stripped of her badge, they denied she’d been punished for suggesting bosses had been looking the other way, but they acknowledged she was marooned in the 311 call center for “personnel reasons,” not disciplinary reasons.
So, a veteran investigator who’s never been accused of misconduct is in her fifth year answering phone calls that aren’t important enough to merit dialing 911. I’m still trying to make sense of that case.
Much of what I’ve done as a reporter at the Tribune over the last few years has been picking at stories like this one, digging, looking for sources, and trying to explain what’s really going on. Over time, I hope, Tribune readers have a more complex understanding of crime in Chicago.
For all the misery in the newspaper business these days, the job is still a privilege and a profound responsibility. It can also be a real kick in the pants. A couple years ago I spent a whole week crisscrossing the city and banging on doors to track down a list of prostitutes and crack addicts who’d spent the same 24-hour stretch in a South Side women’s lockup. And a few months ago I had a front row seat in a federal courtroom when the arrested governor of Illinois walked in wearing a track suit and looking more than a little out of sorts. I can’t think of another job that affords that variety of experience.
So, every couple weeks on this blog I hope to share some of the color and context that I’ve picked up along the way. Maybe readers find it interesting. Or maybe I’ll be voted off this island in a month. I’ll also be filling you in on my experiences as a first-time novelist. As Libby noted a couple weeks ago, my book, A Word to the Wise comes out in December. While the other nine members of The Outfit are all vets with multiple titles on the shelf, this is my first time out. Many of you will be able to relate, I’m sure.
I hope to have a conversation about crime and writing and whatever else is on readers’ minds. The more comments and questions, the better. I’m really thrilled to be involved and still can’t believe this crew asked me to join them.
Lastly, a plug for my reporter colleague Jeff Coen and for the wonderful Centuries & Sleuths bookstore in Forest Park. Jeff will be there Saturday at 2 p.m. talking and signing copies of his book about the historic Family Secrets mob trial. Don’t miss it.
Monday, April 26, 2010
What a glorious mess
By David Heinzmann
It’s not been a quiet week here in Lake Woe… I mean Chicago.
Actually, a couple of weeks. If you like crime and political intrigue, where else could you possibly want to be than Chicago?
I’ll start at the end, at least for me, with the return of Illinois’ most imfamous pawnbroker, Scott Lee Cohen. On Saturday, I broke the story with Rick Pearson that Cohen is going to try to run for governor, amazing as that sounds. After reading the story, which includes the laundry list of almost all (didn’t quite have room in the paper for each one) false statement and embarrassing revelations that collectively imploded Cohen’s candidacy for lieutenant governor earlier this year, a friend of mine joked, “Other than that, it’s a great idea.”
Anytime a reporter can get a prostitute girlfriend, a massage parlor meeting, unpaid child support and an open statewide office in Illinois…. Well, that’s a pretty good story. But the problem is we’ve already been there with Mr. Cohen, so I’m not sure this attempt at running for governor is going to be that much fun. Maybe you don't get to publicly flame out twice in one year, even in this state.
While that sideshow was developing on Friday, the main event in the city was the federal takeover of state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias’ family business, Broadway Bank. Giannoulias is running for U.S. Senate, a campaign that’s bogged down in some seriously thick weeds thanks to the scandals surrounding Broadway. A mountain of red ink and bad loans—some of them to convicted felons who happened to be connected to the Outfit—caught up to the bank on Friday. Oh, look, more prostitutes. (One of the guys the bank gave loans had been convicted of helping run a nationwide call-girl ring.)
It was hard to keep the political corruption stories straight. The day before the feds finally took over Broadway Bank, there was of course the story of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich filing court papers attempting to compel President Obama to testify at Rod’s trial this summer. Details of what Rod was claiming about what Obama might know were supposed to be redacted in the filing. But thanks to the digital age, reporters soon discovered that when you cut and pasted the court document from a PDF to a Word document, all the redacted parts magically reappeared. Rod claims there’s evidence he had a conversation directly with the president-elect about filling Obama’s senate seat. Obama has been on the record maintaining he never talked to Rod about the seat. From the filing, it’s not clear the alleged evidence adds up to what Rod is claiming. Either way, will the leader of the free world have to provide some kind of testimony in a trial that may turn into a real three-ring circus this summer?
Let’s see, what else: three men bound and executed found in a car on the Southwest Side last week; the vicious wilding-robbery attack on two young women in Bucktown last week—both of them bludgeoned with a baseball bat over their frigging purses; lots of bodies washing up on the shore of Lake Michigan.
But the thing that stunned me, a little more than a week ago, was seeing that 17 people had been shot in Chicago in one night, with eight of them dying. In the years I covered the Chicago Police Department for the Tribune, when the murder rate was significantly higher than it has been the last couple years, that would have been a bad weekend. This was all in about 12 hours, on a week night.
When I was covering cops, I became familiar with the phenomenon of weather-change violence. Murders and shootings typically are down in Chicago during the winter because of the harsh cold. Much of the mayhem in this city is casual malevolence wrought by gang-bangers running into each other on the street, arguing about just about anything and then pushing it to the point that they know only one way to settle it—with a gun. So a lot of that kind of crime settles down during the long cold winter. But look out in spring. The first warm weekend—often in March or early April—will bring a little boomlet of shootings as people head back outside to enjoy the weather, only to be reminded of the simmering hostility they felt toward some rival over the long cold winter.
But 17 shootings in one night is not a boomlet. That’s a serious mess and indicates something else is going on. After a few years of lower, stable homicide numbers, murders in 2010 are now on pace to be about 20 percent higher than last year. And when you’re talking about the number of killings being in the 500 range, 20 percent is a serious and troubling increase.
So pay attention, crime fans, it’s going to be an interesting summer.
It’s not been a quiet week here in Lake Woe… I mean Chicago.
Actually, a couple of weeks. If you like crime and political intrigue, where else could you possibly want to be than Chicago?
I’ll start at the end, at least for me, with the return of Illinois’ most imfamous pawnbroker, Scott Lee Cohen. On Saturday, I broke the story with Rick Pearson that Cohen is going to try to run for governor, amazing as that sounds. After reading the story, which includes the laundry list of almost all (didn’t quite have room in the paper for each one) false statement and embarrassing revelations that collectively imploded Cohen’s candidacy for lieutenant governor earlier this year, a friend of mine joked, “Other than that, it’s a great idea.”
Anytime a reporter can get a prostitute girlfriend, a massage parlor meeting, unpaid child support and an open statewide office in Illinois…. Well, that’s a pretty good story. But the problem is we’ve already been there with Mr. Cohen, so I’m not sure this attempt at running for governor is going to be that much fun. Maybe you don't get to publicly flame out twice in one year, even in this state.
While that sideshow was developing on Friday, the main event in the city was the federal takeover of state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias’ family business, Broadway Bank. Giannoulias is running for U.S. Senate, a campaign that’s bogged down in some seriously thick weeds thanks to the scandals surrounding Broadway. A mountain of red ink and bad loans—some of them to convicted felons who happened to be connected to the Outfit—caught up to the bank on Friday. Oh, look, more prostitutes. (One of the guys the bank gave loans had been convicted of helping run a nationwide call-girl ring.)
It was hard to keep the political corruption stories straight. The day before the feds finally took over Broadway Bank, there was of course the story of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich filing court papers attempting to compel President Obama to testify at Rod’s trial this summer. Details of what Rod was claiming about what Obama might know were supposed to be redacted in the filing. But thanks to the digital age, reporters soon discovered that when you cut and pasted the court document from a PDF to a Word document, all the redacted parts magically reappeared. Rod claims there’s evidence he had a conversation directly with the president-elect about filling Obama’s senate seat. Obama has been on the record maintaining he never talked to Rod about the seat. From the filing, it’s not clear the alleged evidence adds up to what Rod is claiming. Either way, will the leader of the free world have to provide some kind of testimony in a trial that may turn into a real three-ring circus this summer?
Let’s see, what else: three men bound and executed found in a car on the Southwest Side last week; the vicious wilding-robbery attack on two young women in Bucktown last week—both of them bludgeoned with a baseball bat over their frigging purses; lots of bodies washing up on the shore of Lake Michigan.
But the thing that stunned me, a little more than a week ago, was seeing that 17 people had been shot in Chicago in one night, with eight of them dying. In the years I covered the Chicago Police Department for the Tribune, when the murder rate was significantly higher than it has been the last couple years, that would have been a bad weekend. This was all in about 12 hours, on a week night.
When I was covering cops, I became familiar with the phenomenon of weather-change violence. Murders and shootings typically are down in Chicago during the winter because of the harsh cold. Much of the mayhem in this city is casual malevolence wrought by gang-bangers running into each other on the street, arguing about just about anything and then pushing it to the point that they know only one way to settle it—with a gun. So a lot of that kind of crime settles down during the long cold winter. But look out in spring. The first warm weekend—often in March or early April—will bring a little boomlet of shootings as people head back outside to enjoy the weather, only to be reminded of the simmering hostility they felt toward some rival over the long cold winter.
But 17 shootings in one night is not a boomlet. That’s a serious mess and indicates something else is going on. After a few years of lower, stable homicide numbers, murders in 2010 are now on pace to be about 20 percent higher than last year. And when you’re talking about the number of killings being in the 500 range, 20 percent is a serious and troubling increase.
So pay attention, crime fans, it’s going to be an interesting summer.
Monday, November 23, 2009
The plot thickens...
By David Heinzmann
I forget which one of my fellow bloggers told me a while back that when you have a book coming out—as I do next month--it’s acceptable to shamelessly self-promote for at least a couple months worth of posts here on the Outfit. But interesting Chicago crime stuff keeps happening that I think people might want to read about. This week is no different.
Last Monday morning, a little after 6 a.m., I was rudely awakened by an email on my phone that said: Michael Scott is dead. His body found under a bridge in River North.
I jumped out of bed and made a call to a source, and learned something new and chilling. Scott had a bullet in his head.
The last time I had talked to Michael Scott, a longtime close ally of Mayor Daley, he accused me of being out to get him. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it.
Over the summer, my coworker Todd Lighty and I wrote several stories about Scott’s real estate dealings, and their troubling connections to his role as president of the Chicago school board, as well as his position on Daley’s Olympic committee. We had two significant stories, first that Scott was angling to take control of city-owned vacant lots next to the West Side park where the Olympic cycling tracks would be built. The land was currently almost worthless, but if the $30 million Olympic complex was built, the condos and stores he planned to build could have been worth a fortune. Read the whole thing here http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chicagoolympics/chi-090807scott-2016-4,0,2216786.story… And we followed it a few weeks later with this story about Scott’s ties to an even bigger development, herehttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-olympic-real-estate-25-sep25,0,2667598.story
After our first story, Daley backed Scott, and Olympic officials initially said it was OK. But when I pressed them with questions about their conflict-of-interest policy, they eventually said it wasn’t OK, and made Scott sever his ties to the development.
It was an embarrassing summer for Scott, and it wasn’t getting any easier. Over the last couple of weeks, Lighty and I were planning to report another story—that Scott had billed the public schools for his $3,000 trip to Copenhagen to be with the Olympic team when the 2016 host city was chosen last month. An internal investigation over Scott’s use of his expense account had been percolating at the schools headquarters since Lighty filed a demand for documents eary this month.
But none of these problems seemed like something an experienced politico would kill himself over. While we dug for reasons last week, the murmurs from Scott’s friends grew louder that it couldn’t have been suicide. Somebody must have killed Scott.
The questions bubbled over toward the end of the week, after the Cook County Medical Examiner ruled the case was a suicide, and Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis balked, saying the police investigation wasn’t ready to rule either way. Then some raving woman ran up to the Tribune Tower and heaved a brick through the plate glass of WGN's streetside studio. She was ranting that we were covering up Scott's murder.
Every cop I’ve talked to about the case, including some who were at the scene, has said this was definitely a suicide. Scott’s own gun. Gunshot residue on his hand. Little details, like the fact that he was left-handed and was shot in the left side of his head.
So why did he do it? I think we’ll be digging on that question for a while. It’s one Chicago’s more compelling mysteries at the moment. And that’s saying something.
I think all of the novelists on this blog would agree, sometimes it’s difficult to come up with plot lines that are stranger than the truth of what goes on in this town. I mean, Patti Blagojevich on reality TV in the jungle would have seemed like it was stretching things a bit if Christopher Buckley had made it up.
But then again, this can give us all a liberating measure of license. Who says it couldn’t happen? This is Chicago.
Oh, and by the way, the next time I blog will be three days shy of my Dec. 9 publication date. I promise (to myself) to shamelessly self-promote A Word to the Wise (AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW!!!) then.
I forget which one of my fellow bloggers told me a while back that when you have a book coming out—as I do next month--it’s acceptable to shamelessly self-promote for at least a couple months worth of posts here on the Outfit. But interesting Chicago crime stuff keeps happening that I think people might want to read about. This week is no different.
Last Monday morning, a little after 6 a.m., I was rudely awakened by an email on my phone that said: Michael Scott is dead. His body found under a bridge in River North.
I jumped out of bed and made a call to a source, and learned something new and chilling. Scott had a bullet in his head.
The last time I had talked to Michael Scott, a longtime close ally of Mayor Daley, he accused me of being out to get him. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it.
Over the summer, my coworker Todd Lighty and I wrote several stories about Scott’s real estate dealings, and their troubling connections to his role as president of the Chicago school board, as well as his position on Daley’s Olympic committee. We had two significant stories, first that Scott was angling to take control of city-owned vacant lots next to the West Side park where the Olympic cycling tracks would be built. The land was currently almost worthless, but if the $30 million Olympic complex was built, the condos and stores he planned to build could have been worth a fortune. Read the whole thing here http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chicagoolympics/chi-090807scott-2016-4,0,2216786.story… And we followed it a few weeks later with this story about Scott’s ties to an even bigger development, herehttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-olympic-real-estate-25-sep25,0,2667598.story
After our first story, Daley backed Scott, and Olympic officials initially said it was OK. But when I pressed them with questions about their conflict-of-interest policy, they eventually said it wasn’t OK, and made Scott sever his ties to the development.
It was an embarrassing summer for Scott, and it wasn’t getting any easier. Over the last couple of weeks, Lighty and I were planning to report another story—that Scott had billed the public schools for his $3,000 trip to Copenhagen to be with the Olympic team when the 2016 host city was chosen last month. An internal investigation over Scott’s use of his expense account had been percolating at the schools headquarters since Lighty filed a demand for documents eary this month.
But none of these problems seemed like something an experienced politico would kill himself over. While we dug for reasons last week, the murmurs from Scott’s friends grew louder that it couldn’t have been suicide. Somebody must have killed Scott.
The questions bubbled over toward the end of the week, after the Cook County Medical Examiner ruled the case was a suicide, and Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis balked, saying the police investigation wasn’t ready to rule either way. Then some raving woman ran up to the Tribune Tower and heaved a brick through the plate glass of WGN's streetside studio. She was ranting that we were covering up Scott's murder.
Every cop I’ve talked to about the case, including some who were at the scene, has said this was definitely a suicide. Scott’s own gun. Gunshot residue on his hand. Little details, like the fact that he was left-handed and was shot in the left side of his head.
So why did he do it? I think we’ll be digging on that question for a while. It’s one Chicago’s more compelling mysteries at the moment. And that’s saying something.
I think all of the novelists on this blog would agree, sometimes it’s difficult to come up with plot lines that are stranger than the truth of what goes on in this town. I mean, Patti Blagojevich on reality TV in the jungle would have seemed like it was stretching things a bit if Christopher Buckley had made it up.
But then again, this can give us all a liberating measure of license. Who says it couldn’t happen? This is Chicago.
Oh, and by the way, the next time I blog will be three days shy of my Dec. 9 publication date. I promise (to myself) to shamelessly self-promote A Word to the Wise (AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW!!!) then.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Large denominations
By David Heinzmann
Where do you break a thousand-dollar bill?
That might have been my favorite detail the other day from the news about an FBI raid of Frank Calabrese’s house in Oak Brook. Calabrese has been behind bars for several years, and now he’s serving life for his convictions in the 2007 Family Secrets case. But members of his immediate family still live in the hulking brown brick house in an Oak Brook gated community, and the feds went there with a search warrant last week.
Frank’s brother Nick, the Outfit hit man who was the star witnesses at the Family Secrets trial, had told authorities that his brother had treasure and evidence stashed in secret compartments all over the place. Nick’s testimony put Frank, Joey the Clown Lombardo, James Marcello, and a few other Outfit bigshots behind bars for life. Frank was a bookie and hit man. Nick said his brother’s favorite method of killing people was to beat them, strangle them with a piece of rope and the cut their throats to make sure the job was done.
He’s also about 70 and the chances he’ll ever get out of prison and be able to return to his Oak Brook basement, take down the large frame of family photos, unscrew the secret panel and use his stash of money and guns is pretty slim.
But it was there just in case. Agents also found a roll of $26,000 upstairs in a desk drawer used by the current woman of the house. So maybe the family was dipping into the stash here and there, as needed. Given that a federal judge had ordered Calabrese to pay $27 million in restitution for his crimes, it's unlikely any of the stash will be returned to Oak Brook.
Among the valuables the FBI found stashed behind a false wall in the basement was nearly $730,000 in cash… mostly in thousand- and five-hundred-dollar bills. Crisp stacks in Ziploc bags and manila envelopes.
Many thought the most intriguing detail of the FBI raid on Calabrese’s house was the discovery of a trove of small cassette tapes and recording equipment. Calabrese liked to record conversations, apparently. Whether the contents of those tapes will lead to new cases remains to be seen.
But I like the thousand-dollar bills adding up to three-quarters of a million bucks. The photos the FBI released were of such neat, crisp stacks. Did the money come from a bank? Which bank around Chicago is supplying bosses of the Outfit with crisp bundles of …Grover Clevelands. Yes, Grover Cleveland is the president on the $1,000 bill.
Here’s another weird thing, those bills are pretty rare. According to the U.S. Treasury web site, the $1,000 bill and the $500 bill (William McKinley) were discontinued in the late 1960s. They’re still legal tender, of course, but bills that big haven’t actually been printed since the 1950s, apparently.
The FBI also found ledgers of mob financial dealings, a few guns wrapped and taped in towels, and a 1,000 pieces of jewelry that appeared to be the fruits of jewelry store heists—most of it was still in boxes with price tags. I’m guessing that pile would take the whole stash well over a million dollars.
Maybe down the road a bit we’ll hear what was on the tapes, and what was in the ledgers. Perhaps even which jewelry stores were ripped off. But I want to know where Calabrese got those Clevelands and McKinleys.
Where do you break a thousand-dollar bill?
That might have been my favorite detail the other day from the news about an FBI raid of Frank Calabrese’s house in Oak Brook. Calabrese has been behind bars for several years, and now he’s serving life for his convictions in the 2007 Family Secrets case. But members of his immediate family still live in the hulking brown brick house in an Oak Brook gated community, and the feds went there with a search warrant last week.
Frank’s brother Nick, the Outfit hit man who was the star witnesses at the Family Secrets trial, had told authorities that his brother had treasure and evidence stashed in secret compartments all over the place. Nick’s testimony put Frank, Joey the Clown Lombardo, James Marcello, and a few other Outfit bigshots behind bars for life. Frank was a bookie and hit man. Nick said his brother’s favorite method of killing people was to beat them, strangle them with a piece of rope and the cut their throats to make sure the job was done.
He’s also about 70 and the chances he’ll ever get out of prison and be able to return to his Oak Brook basement, take down the large frame of family photos, unscrew the secret panel and use his stash of money and guns is pretty slim.
But it was there just in case. Agents also found a roll of $26,000 upstairs in a desk drawer used by the current woman of the house. So maybe the family was dipping into the stash here and there, as needed. Given that a federal judge had ordered Calabrese to pay $27 million in restitution for his crimes, it's unlikely any of the stash will be returned to Oak Brook.
Among the valuables the FBI found stashed behind a false wall in the basement was nearly $730,000 in cash… mostly in thousand- and five-hundred-dollar bills. Crisp stacks in Ziploc bags and manila envelopes.
Many thought the most intriguing detail of the FBI raid on Calabrese’s house was the discovery of a trove of small cassette tapes and recording equipment. Calabrese liked to record conversations, apparently. Whether the contents of those tapes will lead to new cases remains to be seen.
But I like the thousand-dollar bills adding up to three-quarters of a million bucks. The photos the FBI released were of such neat, crisp stacks. Did the money come from a bank? Which bank around Chicago is supplying bosses of the Outfit with crisp bundles of …Grover Clevelands. Yes, Grover Cleveland is the president on the $1,000 bill.
Here’s another weird thing, those bills are pretty rare. According to the U.S. Treasury web site, the $1,000 bill and the $500 bill (William McKinley) were discontinued in the late 1960s. They’re still legal tender, of course, but bills that big haven’t actually been printed since the 1950s, apparently.
The FBI also found ledgers of mob financial dealings, a few guns wrapped and taped in towels, and a 1,000 pieces of jewelry that appeared to be the fruits of jewelry store heists—most of it was still in boxes with price tags. I’m guessing that pile would take the whole stash well over a million dollars.
Maybe down the road a bit we’ll hear what was on the tapes, and what was in the ledgers. Perhaps even which jewelry stores were ripped off. But I want to know where Calabrese got those Clevelands and McKinleys.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
That first cover
By David Heinzmann
Libby’s post a couple days ago seeking input on her next book cover had my full attention. As it happens, I’m eagerly and anxiously waiting to see my own cover, which the publisher’s designers are working on right now. I can’t wait. All the line editing is done, and I’ve seen the formatted pages of the book, but laying eyes on the cover will just make the whole process seem that much more real to me.
As I’ve noted before, A WORD TO THE WISE is my first book so this is all new and exciting.
At the Love is Murder conference in February I met a novelist who said tears came to his eyes when he saw his first book cover. In his mind, it was perfect. The designers had heeded his suggestions, and the cover distilled the central threads of the book into a single dark image. It was everything he had hoped for. He’d written several books that were never published, so that first one was a wonderfully cathartic experience.
I hope I’m so lucky. I helped pick the main image from a stock photo catalog, so if I’m disappointed I’ll have myself mostly to blame.
My protagonist, Augustine Flood, lives in a River North high rise with a nice view down on the Chicago River. The book is set in the middle of a brutal January, and Flood occasionally looks down at the jagged plates of ice filling in the river like puzzle pieces fitting together as it gets colder and colder.
Over the several winters that I’ve trudged across the Wabash and Michigan Avenue bridges on my way to the Tribune Tower, I’ve loved watching the river freeze over in pieces like that.
So we went looking for stock images of that ice on the river. There wasn’t much available, but I eventually stumbled on a twilight photo of the distant skyline taken from somewhere along the shore south of the Loop. Although it’s not the river, the foreground is full of those jagged shards of ice piling up in the shallows. With the arresting color and light in the photo, I was more than willing to compromise.
It’s wonderful to be dealing with these tasks because a year ago I had pretty much given up on seeing this book in print. My agent, Jeff, had been encouraging about the prospect of selling it after he read it—three years ago. He’d taken a pass on representing an earlier book I’d written, so his enthusiasm about this one had really gotten me excited. Early on we had some good nibbles, but nobody bit for real. And then the rejection emails started to stretch out over the months. Meanwhile, I was finishing a second Flood book, which I felt was better than the first. But what was I going to do with a second book in a series if the first was never published?
Then came Jeff’s email, out of the blue, while I was vacationing with my extended family in northern Wisconsin. Five Star wanted to publish A WORD TO THE WISE. Granted it was late and I’d had a few when the message came, but I had to read the note four or five times before it sunk in.
Then I woke everybody up in the cabin and had another drink.
Ten months later, here I am fretting over the cover. I’ll post it here as soon as it arrives.
And for the record, I liked 1A and 1B best among Libby’s potential covers.
Libby’s post a couple days ago seeking input on her next book cover had my full attention. As it happens, I’m eagerly and anxiously waiting to see my own cover, which the publisher’s designers are working on right now. I can’t wait. All the line editing is done, and I’ve seen the formatted pages of the book, but laying eyes on the cover will just make the whole process seem that much more real to me.
As I’ve noted before, A WORD TO THE WISE is my first book so this is all new and exciting.
At the Love is Murder conference in February I met a novelist who said tears came to his eyes when he saw his first book cover. In his mind, it was perfect. The designers had heeded his suggestions, and the cover distilled the central threads of the book into a single dark image. It was everything he had hoped for. He’d written several books that were never published, so that first one was a wonderfully cathartic experience.
I hope I’m so lucky. I helped pick the main image from a stock photo catalog, so if I’m disappointed I’ll have myself mostly to blame.
My protagonist, Augustine Flood, lives in a River North high rise with a nice view down on the Chicago River. The book is set in the middle of a brutal January, and Flood occasionally looks down at the jagged plates of ice filling in the river like puzzle pieces fitting together as it gets colder and colder.
Over the several winters that I’ve trudged across the Wabash and Michigan Avenue bridges on my way to the Tribune Tower, I’ve loved watching the river freeze over in pieces like that.
So we went looking for stock images of that ice on the river. There wasn’t much available, but I eventually stumbled on a twilight photo of the distant skyline taken from somewhere along the shore south of the Loop. Although it’s not the river, the foreground is full of those jagged shards of ice piling up in the shallows. With the arresting color and light in the photo, I was more than willing to compromise.
It’s wonderful to be dealing with these tasks because a year ago I had pretty much given up on seeing this book in print. My agent, Jeff, had been encouraging about the prospect of selling it after he read it—three years ago. He’d taken a pass on representing an earlier book I’d written, so his enthusiasm about this one had really gotten me excited. Early on we had some good nibbles, but nobody bit for real. And then the rejection emails started to stretch out over the months. Meanwhile, I was finishing a second Flood book, which I felt was better than the first. But what was I going to do with a second book in a series if the first was never published?
Then came Jeff’s email, out of the blue, while I was vacationing with my extended family in northern Wisconsin. Five Star wanted to publish A WORD TO THE WISE. Granted it was late and I’d had a few when the message came, but I had to read the note four or five times before it sunk in.
Then I woke everybody up in the cabin and had another drink.
Ten months later, here I am fretting over the cover. I’ll post it here as soon as it arrives.
And for the record, I liked 1A and 1B best among Libby’s potential covers.
Monday, January 04, 2010
The hard, cold, gray part of the year
By David Heinzmann
When I was reading the uncorrected proofs of A Word to the Wise last summer, at one point I was hit full in the face by a passage that basically connected all the dots of the plot.
The problem was the scene was only about a third of the way through the book. What was I thinking?
Not that the book is intended to be an elaborately puzzling whodunit. It’s more of a howdunit or whydunit, but what I had thought was foreshadowing in previous drafts now stuck out as giving the story away. I trimmed the passage, nearly a whole page of a scene between my protagonist, Augustine Flood and his journalist friend, before the book went to press.
This blunder, or near blunder, is evidence that plotting is the hardest part for me. I think it’s too easy for me to get lost in the flavor of a stretch of dialog, the setting, or even the action once it starts. But keeping the plot structured, taut and apace, especially when the story starts to take on a life of its own and find new directions, is where the painful work really lies for me.
I’d love to hear other writer’s thoughts on this. What aspects of fiction do you struggle with more, and how do you keep your problems in check while you’re cruising on other fronts?
I’ve thought about this a bit over the last several days as people I know who have read A Word to the Wise since it was published last month have reached out to me about the places and stories they recognize. A lawyer I met when I was a reporter at the Daily Southtown years ago sent me an email noting the harrowing scene in Orland Park. An old friend who knows well the restaurant on which the fictional Napoli Tap was fashioned called me over the weekend. We’ve eaten together at that restaurant countless times over the last fifteen years. A colleague asked whether a murder in the book was inspired by a now-forgotten but once-famous murder in the south suburbs. Sort of.
Anyway, the feedback has put a finer point on what I subconsciously knew I had set out to do in A Word to the Wise. This is Chicago as I have known it. I’ve lived and worked in the city exactly fifteen years. Because it’s been five years since I actually started writing the novel, I’ll say that the book is Chicago as I experienced and observed it in the first decade that I lived here.
My next novel is a very different book, although it is another Augustine Flood story. But I know Chicago in a different way than I did five years ago and the book explores some of that new territory.
A Word to the Wise is set in exactly this time of year, the middle weeks of January during a brutally cold winter, after the holiday machinery is put away and the city hunkers down for the grimmest part of the season. It’s sort of fitting that the book was published just before Christmas, giving me a hectic few weeks of trying to get books into people’s hands before the holidays. And now… January. Months ago when I started to talk to book store owners about setting up events they all said forget January. It’s not worth it in the post-holiday doldrums. So I’ll be laying low for a few weeks. My next event for the book will be a discussion and signing at Centuries and Sleuths in Forest Park on January 24.
And a couple words of thanks.
When I joined the Outfit last summer I was extremely proud to have my name affixed to a list of writers that included Sara Paretsky. It has been an extraordinary privilege. But beyond that, Sara has gone out of her way to be welcoming and generous. Her feedback on my blog posts about crime in Chicago—especially her concern for the welfare of serious journalism—have given me great encouragement. Many thanks, Sara.
When I was reading the uncorrected proofs of A Word to the Wise last summer, at one point I was hit full in the face by a passage that basically connected all the dots of the plot.
The problem was the scene was only about a third of the way through the book. What was I thinking?
Not that the book is intended to be an elaborately puzzling whodunit. It’s more of a howdunit or whydunit, but what I had thought was foreshadowing in previous drafts now stuck out as giving the story away. I trimmed the passage, nearly a whole page of a scene between my protagonist, Augustine Flood and his journalist friend, before the book went to press.
This blunder, or near blunder, is evidence that plotting is the hardest part for me. I think it’s too easy for me to get lost in the flavor of a stretch of dialog, the setting, or even the action once it starts. But keeping the plot structured, taut and apace, especially when the story starts to take on a life of its own and find new directions, is where the painful work really lies for me.
I’d love to hear other writer’s thoughts on this. What aspects of fiction do you struggle with more, and how do you keep your problems in check while you’re cruising on other fronts?
I’ve thought about this a bit over the last several days as people I know who have read A Word to the Wise since it was published last month have reached out to me about the places and stories they recognize. A lawyer I met when I was a reporter at the Daily Southtown years ago sent me an email noting the harrowing scene in Orland Park. An old friend who knows well the restaurant on which the fictional Napoli Tap was fashioned called me over the weekend. We’ve eaten together at that restaurant countless times over the last fifteen years. A colleague asked whether a murder in the book was inspired by a now-forgotten but once-famous murder in the south suburbs. Sort of.
Anyway, the feedback has put a finer point on what I subconsciously knew I had set out to do in A Word to the Wise. This is Chicago as I have known it. I’ve lived and worked in the city exactly fifteen years. Because it’s been five years since I actually started writing the novel, I’ll say that the book is Chicago as I experienced and observed it in the first decade that I lived here.
My next novel is a very different book, although it is another Augustine Flood story. But I know Chicago in a different way than I did five years ago and the book explores some of that new territory.
A Word to the Wise is set in exactly this time of year, the middle weeks of January during a brutally cold winter, after the holiday machinery is put away and the city hunkers down for the grimmest part of the season. It’s sort of fitting that the book was published just before Christmas, giving me a hectic few weeks of trying to get books into people’s hands before the holidays. And now… January. Months ago when I started to talk to book store owners about setting up events they all said forget January. It’s not worth it in the post-holiday doldrums. So I’ll be laying low for a few weeks. My next event for the book will be a discussion and signing at Centuries and Sleuths in Forest Park on January 24.
And a couple words of thanks.
When I joined the Outfit last summer I was extremely proud to have my name affixed to a list of writers that included Sara Paretsky. It has been an extraordinary privilege. But beyond that, Sara has gone out of her way to be welcoming and generous. Her feedback on my blog posts about crime in Chicago—especially her concern for the welfare of serious journalism—have given me great encouragement. Many thanks, Sara.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Here's to whatever comes next
By David Heinzmann
I always get annoyed when I have to listen to someone with deep ideological leanings—more often than not they are to the right—harangue the press for its perceived liberal biases. Most of the good political reporters I know have been around long enough, and seen enough of the sausage being made, that they really don’t lean one way or the other. In fact they all lean heavily in the same direction—toward general skepticism.
Along the same lines, in the last weeks of my time covering Chicago’s failed Olympic bid, people kept asking me whether I was for or against the city winning the 2016 Summer Games. I had a hard time persuading some of them that I really felt disinterested in the outcome last Friday in Copenhagen.
When the word came in that Chicago had been knocked out of the competition by International Olympic Committee members in the first round of voting, I was as shocked as anybody. But I didn’t feel disappointed or elated. I merely felt the urgency needed to get our first report ready and posted online.
I was sitting at a keyboard in the Tribune newsroom, playing the role of rewrite guy, taking reporters feeds from Copenhagen and Daley Plaza, cleaning them up and fitting them into our stories going online.
When the smoke cleared after lunch, a colleague and I sat down to rewrite the Sunday “now what?” story we had already prepared. Before the IOC vote, the story had been geared to telling readers what to look for first as Chicago started to build up for the Games. We rewrote it to tell people what little lasting legacy there would be in the wake of the failed bid.
Mostly, the answer to that question is the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital campus on the near South Side, which the city paid $86 million for in anticipation that developers would snap it up to build the Olympic Village. Now, it will be developed as regular old real estate, and since Chicago didn’t get the Games, the price for the land goes up to $91 million. And real estate experts say that, in this market, no developer is going to want to touch that land for about five years.
Covering the Olympics would have been a roller coaster ride, for sure. But by the same token, seven years is a long time to report about the buildup to anything. One of my first jobs in journalism was working in the Associated Press’ Atlanta bureau two years before the 1996 Olympics there. I covered a lot of Atlanta Committee to Organize the Games press conferences and don’t remember relishing any of them.
My firmest memory of that time is one Saturday morning sitting in a conference room at the ACOG headquarters for a “press conference” with IOC officials. When I got there, it was me, three or four other reporters and a handful of TV cameramen, our attention directed to the speakerphone sitting on top of the polished wood conference table. The IOC members were on the line from Switzerland. I’ll never forget those poor TV guys focusing their cameras in on that speakerphone in an empty room.
In the aftermath of the Chicago bid, there could be some good stories. For instance, what discussions went on between bid chairman Pat Ryan, Mayor Daley and the White House? Did Chicago people promise the White House that it was safe for President Obama to go to Copenhagen because the city had the votes? On Meet the Press yesterday, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post suggested as much. And as he pointed out, boy, were they wrong.
But that’s not likely to be my story. On Friday, I gave a phone interview to BBC radio on the Olympic decision. I had figured I would be asked about the reaction in Chicago, but when the interview started—live—I was thrown into the role of national political analyst. All they wanted to know was how damaging this incident would be to Obama’s efforts to pass health care legislation. I winged it.
Anyway, there are plenty of next stories out there. And I will admit to being a bit relieved to have a normal work schedule back for a bit. My novel, A Word to the Wise, comes out in two months and I really need to spend some of my energy focusing on getting out there and pushing it.
I start in earnest this weekend, heading to Booked for Murder in Madison for an event Friday night, and then to Books & Co. in Oconomowoc on Saturday. And I’m hoping to meet a bunch of you, readers and fellow bloggers, at Bouchercon the following week.
Onward.
I always get annoyed when I have to listen to someone with deep ideological leanings—more often than not they are to the right—harangue the press for its perceived liberal biases. Most of the good political reporters I know have been around long enough, and seen enough of the sausage being made, that they really don’t lean one way or the other. In fact they all lean heavily in the same direction—toward general skepticism.
Along the same lines, in the last weeks of my time covering Chicago’s failed Olympic bid, people kept asking me whether I was for or against the city winning the 2016 Summer Games. I had a hard time persuading some of them that I really felt disinterested in the outcome last Friday in Copenhagen.
When the word came in that Chicago had been knocked out of the competition by International Olympic Committee members in the first round of voting, I was as shocked as anybody. But I didn’t feel disappointed or elated. I merely felt the urgency needed to get our first report ready and posted online.
I was sitting at a keyboard in the Tribune newsroom, playing the role of rewrite guy, taking reporters feeds from Copenhagen and Daley Plaza, cleaning them up and fitting them into our stories going online.
When the smoke cleared after lunch, a colleague and I sat down to rewrite the Sunday “now what?” story we had already prepared. Before the IOC vote, the story had been geared to telling readers what to look for first as Chicago started to build up for the Games. We rewrote it to tell people what little lasting legacy there would be in the wake of the failed bid.
Mostly, the answer to that question is the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital campus on the near South Side, which the city paid $86 million for in anticipation that developers would snap it up to build the Olympic Village. Now, it will be developed as regular old real estate, and since Chicago didn’t get the Games, the price for the land goes up to $91 million. And real estate experts say that, in this market, no developer is going to want to touch that land for about five years.
Covering the Olympics would have been a roller coaster ride, for sure. But by the same token, seven years is a long time to report about the buildup to anything. One of my first jobs in journalism was working in the Associated Press’ Atlanta bureau two years before the 1996 Olympics there. I covered a lot of Atlanta Committee to Organize the Games press conferences and don’t remember relishing any of them.
My firmest memory of that time is one Saturday morning sitting in a conference room at the ACOG headquarters for a “press conference” with IOC officials. When I got there, it was me, three or four other reporters and a handful of TV cameramen, our attention directed to the speakerphone sitting on top of the polished wood conference table. The IOC members were on the line from Switzerland. I’ll never forget those poor TV guys focusing their cameras in on that speakerphone in an empty room.
In the aftermath of the Chicago bid, there could be some good stories. For instance, what discussions went on between bid chairman Pat Ryan, Mayor Daley and the White House? Did Chicago people promise the White House that it was safe for President Obama to go to Copenhagen because the city had the votes? On Meet the Press yesterday, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post suggested as much. And as he pointed out, boy, were they wrong.
But that’s not likely to be my story. On Friday, I gave a phone interview to BBC radio on the Olympic decision. I had figured I would be asked about the reaction in Chicago, but when the interview started—live—I was thrown into the role of national political analyst. All they wanted to know was how damaging this incident would be to Obama’s efforts to pass health care legislation. I winged it.
Anyway, there are plenty of next stories out there. And I will admit to being a bit relieved to have a normal work schedule back for a bit. My novel, A Word to the Wise, comes out in two months and I really need to spend some of my energy focusing on getting out there and pushing it.
I start in earnest this weekend, heading to Booked for Murder in Madison for an event Friday night, and then to Books & Co. in Oconomowoc on Saturday. And I’m hoping to meet a bunch of you, readers and fellow bloggers, at Bouchercon the following week.
Onward.
Monday, April 12, 2010
By the dawn's early light
By David Heinzmann
The last couple times I’ve posted I’ve written about recent mob stories in the news. I don’t want to sound like too much of a broken record so I’ll just mention that there was another good one that broke on Friday. A trio of 70-year-old mob jewel thieves caught casing a bank and the house of another dead mobster. Read about it here, and follow the link to read the FBI affidavit for a search warrant. It’s pretty entertaining. And crime writers will find the details of the affidavit intriguing, and maybe even useful.
Anyway, I’ve started writing a new book while I wait to see what’s going to happen to Book 2, which is a sequel to A Word To The Wise. If it sounds like I’m overly productive, don’t be misled. This second book had been mostly written a few years ago, but I set the revisions and rewriting aside for a loooong time once A Word To The Wise was picked up for publication and I had all sorts of editing and other stuff to do.
Over the last few months, I’ve finally gotten the revisions done, and I’m on to the next one. I’ve been messing around with a plot line and a few characters, and have the arc of the plot lined up solidly enough to start writing. I’m half way through the second chapter.
But moving directly into a new book has some special challenges this time around.
The first two books are both about a character named Augustine Flood, and writing about him had grown to feel pretty comfortable and familiar. But this next book is a departure. It is still set in Chicago, but there is no Flood. Most of the characters are Chicago cops, including the protagonist. I’m still finding my way with this character and fighting the urge to throw Flood’s name in there somewhere.
I have faith that once I’m a few more chapters into it the new story will take over and pull me along. But at the moment I’m still laboring to get out of the Augustine Flood mindset and into the new guy. I’m guessing some of you have had the same struggles, especially if you have written a standalone book or started a new character after a few in a series. Thoughts, experiences, advice?
Part of my problem is that I haven’t managed to string together a big block of time to write yet to get the pump primed for this book. I haven’t quite found the writing schedule that’s going to work for me this time around. I was originally a morning writer, but switched to a nighttime writer after we had a baby. Now my second kid is sleeping a little later some mornings, making me flirt with the idea of going back to being a morning writer. If I can keep everybody else in the house in bed until seven, I’ll gladly starting getting up at five to write.
Nights just aren’t working. Lately, I’ve just been too beat in the evenings to do much other than pour a drink and sit down with my wife to watch Damages and Justified. Speaking of which, Justified is sort of a delight if you like Elmore Leonard. It’s an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s character, Raylan Givens. Some of the dialogue and story lines are lifted from his books, but Leonard is also a producer of the show and the episodes feel a little like reading his books. (I shouldn’t be shilling for FX, but both of those shows are pretty good.)
Anyway, it’s 5:25 a.m. as I finish this and I’m about to start Chapter 3. Keep your fingers crossed for me that nobody under four feet tall wakes up in the next two hours.
And P.S., I wish I would have been more on top of the blog last week so I could have been the first person to comment on Bryan's blog about the powers that be evaluating stories by how well they're doing online. The tyranny of the clicks is reshaping the news. It's a frightening trend as media companies get more and more desperate waging a losing battle for online market share.
The last couple times I’ve posted I’ve written about recent mob stories in the news. I don’t want to sound like too much of a broken record so I’ll just mention that there was another good one that broke on Friday. A trio of 70-year-old mob jewel thieves caught casing a bank and the house of another dead mobster. Read about it here, and follow the link to read the FBI affidavit for a search warrant. It’s pretty entertaining. And crime writers will find the details of the affidavit intriguing, and maybe even useful.
Anyway, I’ve started writing a new book while I wait to see what’s going to happen to Book 2, which is a sequel to A Word To The Wise. If it sounds like I’m overly productive, don’t be misled. This second book had been mostly written a few years ago, but I set the revisions and rewriting aside for a loooong time once A Word To The Wise was picked up for publication and I had all sorts of editing and other stuff to do.
Over the last few months, I’ve finally gotten the revisions done, and I’m on to the next one. I’ve been messing around with a plot line and a few characters, and have the arc of the plot lined up solidly enough to start writing. I’m half way through the second chapter.
But moving directly into a new book has some special challenges this time around.
The first two books are both about a character named Augustine Flood, and writing about him had grown to feel pretty comfortable and familiar. But this next book is a departure. It is still set in Chicago, but there is no Flood. Most of the characters are Chicago cops, including the protagonist. I’m still finding my way with this character and fighting the urge to throw Flood’s name in there somewhere.
I have faith that once I’m a few more chapters into it the new story will take over and pull me along. But at the moment I’m still laboring to get out of the Augustine Flood mindset and into the new guy. I’m guessing some of you have had the same struggles, especially if you have written a standalone book or started a new character after a few in a series. Thoughts, experiences, advice?
Part of my problem is that I haven’t managed to string together a big block of time to write yet to get the pump primed for this book. I haven’t quite found the writing schedule that’s going to work for me this time around. I was originally a morning writer, but switched to a nighttime writer after we had a baby. Now my second kid is sleeping a little later some mornings, making me flirt with the idea of going back to being a morning writer. If I can keep everybody else in the house in bed until seven, I’ll gladly starting getting up at five to write.
Nights just aren’t working. Lately, I’ve just been too beat in the evenings to do much other than pour a drink and sit down with my wife to watch Damages and Justified. Speaking of which, Justified is sort of a delight if you like Elmore Leonard. It’s an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s character, Raylan Givens. Some of the dialogue and story lines are lifted from his books, but Leonard is also a producer of the show and the episodes feel a little like reading his books. (I shouldn’t be shilling for FX, but both of those shows are pretty good.)
Anyway, it’s 5:25 a.m. as I finish this and I’m about to start Chapter 3. Keep your fingers crossed for me that nobody under four feet tall wakes up in the next two hours.
And P.S., I wish I would have been more on top of the blog last week so I could have been the first person to comment on Bryan's blog about the powers that be evaluating stories by how well they're doing online. The tyranny of the clicks is reshaping the news. It's a frightening trend as media companies get more and more desperate waging a losing battle for online market share.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Outfit at Printers Row
For those of you headed down to the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago this weekend, here's where and when you'll find members of The Outfit:
Saturday, 10:30 AM
Marcus Sakey, David Heinzmann, and Kevin Guilfoile will be discussing the "Thrill of Mystery" with the terrific Gillian Flynn in the Burnham Room at the Hotel Blake (500 S Dearborn). (Sean Chercover, who was also scheduled for this event, is sidelined with an illness, unfortunately.)
Saturday, 3:00 PM
Outfitter emeritus Sara Paretsky will be in conversation with the Tribune's Julia Keller in the Harold Washington Library's Cindy Pritzker Auditorium.
Sunday, 2:00 PM
Libby Fischer Hellmann, Laura Caldwell, and Jamie Freveletti will be contemplating "Crime and Punishment" with Daniel Levin and Jeff Jacobson in the Harold Washington Library's Multi-Purpose Room.
What events and authors are you looking forward to this weekend? Let us know in the comments.
Saturday, 10:30 AM
Marcus Sakey, David Heinzmann, and Kevin Guilfoile will be discussing the "Thrill of Mystery" with the terrific Gillian Flynn in the Burnham Room at the Hotel Blake (500 S Dearborn). (Sean Chercover, who was also scheduled for this event, is sidelined with an illness, unfortunately.)
Saturday, 3:00 PM
Outfitter emeritus Sara Paretsky will be in conversation with the Tribune's Julia Keller in the Harold Washington Library's Cindy Pritzker Auditorium.
Sunday, 2:00 PM
Libby Fischer Hellmann, Laura Caldwell, and Jamie Freveletti will be contemplating "Crime and Punishment" with Daniel Levin and Jeff Jacobson in the Harold Washington Library's Multi-Purpose Room.
What events and authors are you looking forward to this weekend? Let us know in the comments.
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